Redjeb Jordania
A Hunting Trip to Daghestan
and other stories
Previously published as a paperback
under the title “Escape from the South Fork"
Table of Contents
Part One: from far away in time and space …
1. A Hunting Trip to Daghestan
2. Closing the Circle
3. The Music Lesson
4. My Mother was a Cat
5. First Love
6. Adrift
7. Anyone there?
8. A Surprise Party
Part Two: closer to home …
9. An Encounter with the America Cup
10. A Visit to the Dentist
11. Escape from the South Fork
12. Linda Mother-of-God
13. Yellow is the Color of Mourning
14. The Screamers
15. Letter from the New World
© Redjeb Jordania 2008
_______________________
Part One: from far away in time and space …
1. A Hunting Trip to Daghestan
There I was, perched on a skinny horse on a skinny path meandering on the skinny crest of a mountain ridge in Daghestan, my swollen right ankle dangling, doing my best to maintain my balance while glancing apprehensively at the chasms beckoning enticingly on both sides. I was no stranger to mountaineering, and normally had no fear of heights. But I was no horseman, and it is amazing how it seems to be so much more precipitous and dangerous when on horseback than when on foot, even though one is barely four feet higher!
I certainly did not foresee this outcome when I accepted an invitation to go bear hunting in the Caucasus, even though I do not hunt and certainly did not expect to start at this late stage of my life.
That summer of 1991 I had organized an intensive course in English as a Foreign Language in Tbilisi, the capital of The Republic of Georgia, to assist the newly independent Georgians in fulfilling their Western-oriented aspirations and help open up to them a world that they had been cut off from for nearly seventy years.
After the course was over I remained in Tbilisi to watch the unfolding of the rebellion against the strong-armed rule of Georgia’s President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who would eventually be obliged to flee the country. My sympathies were with the rebels, among whom I counted many friends, but I did not actively take sides: after all, even though I was the son of the very first President of pre-soviet Georgia, Noe Jordania (1918-1921), I was a foreigner in my ancestors’ country, born in France, living in East Hampton, barely able to speak the Georgian language.
Among those taking part in the rebellion was David Nadaradze, a young man who had attended our summer English course. David was then about thirty years of age, spoke English very well, but in a stilted manner. Many of his words and expressions sounded rather quaint to our ears because they were often taken directly from his readings of 19th century English literature. He was a lawyer by profession, had had occasion to travel abroad, in Japan in particular, but had never been to America. He was planning to go to the U.S. for further training as an international lawyer, which is why he took our summer course.
We had become friends, and after the course was over he often came to visit me at my hotel, keeping me abreast of the political and military fluctuations of the struggle. Towards the end of that September the fighting in Tbilisi seemed to have calmed down. Taking advantage of the lull and anxious to help me fulfill my wish to visit as much of the country as I could, David invited me to come hunting with him and some friends in the mountains of Daghestan.
Daghestan is a semi-autonomous region of the Russian S.S.R (Socialist Soviet Republic, now part of Russia) It is located high in the Caucasian mountains between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea, on the border of the Georgian province of Kakhetia. David explained that the trip entailed driving first to a small village in Kakheti to spend the night at his friend Merab’s country house. Early in the morning we would be transported in a special 4-wheel-drive vehicle up to the point where we would start climbing on foot. He added that the hard climb would last no more than one and a half hours, and then it would be easy going. We should reach the camping site two or three hours later.
David’s offer sounded very enticing, so I jumped to the occasion, even though, as mentioned above, I had no intention to even try my hand at hunting. I hadn’t brought with me any suitable clothes or footwear. I borrowed a couple of heavy sweaters, since it can get very cold at night at 12,000 feet. David procured two knapsacks and somewhere found a pair of lightweight soccer boots for me, the kind with canvas high tops and spikes underneath to dig in the turf, which I would have to wear with heavy socks that he also brought along. We bought all kind of food to take with us, and he also carried his rifle and ammunition, since we were supposed to be hunters.
We left Tbilisi in his old car in the late afternoon on Thursday, stopped on the way at a roadside stand, quite an elaborate affair under a simple roof with long counters where drinks and food were piled high. We had some delicious Mtzvade, a sort of pork meat shish-kebab roasted on open fires with fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and some of the wonderful Georgian bread—the whole washed down with bottled fruit juice and Borjomi mineral water.
We arrived at his friend’s village around eight in the evening. Merab’s mother, Nino Burgiashvili, was waiting for us. Naturally, in keeping with the norms of Georgian hospitality, even though we just had all that food, Nino insisted upon putting out a lavish spread for us. The only other people there were Merab’s wife Ethery, a young Georgian woman who spoke only Russian because she had been raised in Leningrad, and their little daughter, who was about three years old. I was to learn that Merab and Ethery were both opera singers who lived in the city of Kutaisi, where they were employed at the local opera house. Merab had left the day before with a friend to establish camp in the mountains, where we were expected to join them in a couple days. But the Gods had other plans.
After a good night’s sleep, at 5.30 in the morning we started on our way by truck: huge wheels heavily studded like a bulldozer, 4-wheel-drive, 16 speeds, two gearshifts, and a cabin good for only two persons since most of the space was taken up by the engine. I don’t know if it was really a privilege, but I was invited to sit in the cabin, while David and two other young men climbed onto the open bed behind. What a trip! We started on a track which I thought was very rough, but turned out to be quite good in comparison to what was to come: its only pitfalls were huge pot holes, streams flowing across, and deep mud.
As we went up the mountain the dirt road became more and more horrendous. I never thought a vehicle could negotiate such obstacles: the truck would plunge down into a ravine strewn with man-sized boulders, rear over huge stones, roll from side to side while bucking like crazy, and squeeze between huge trees. The driver meanwhile nonchalantly went on
smoking nonstop, lighting cigarette after cigarette, while struggling with the wheel and handling the two gearshifts—one of which was placed behind the engine, so that he had to reach practically behind his back each time he needed it, which was about every twenty seconds. I had to hold on with all my strength, bracing myself with both feet and hands. I could easily have used a couple more. I can’t imagine how the guys in the back managed.
That part of the trip lasted a good two hours. By the time we arrived at our destination I felt it was enough work for the day, as I was already stiff and exhausted from my struggle to keep from banging against the sides of the cabin. Incidentally, all this happened without any breakfast whatsoever, unless one can dignify as breakfast the glass of water I managed to gulp before leaving the house.
The end of the so-called "road" was marked by a shepherd's hut: walls made of flat stones piled on top of each other without any attempt to fill the cracks and holes in between; overhead some plastic fabric was stretched between poles to serve as a leaky roof. And that was all. In this part of the world people bring their animals to the mountains in spring and herd them back to the villages in fall before the snow. Perhaps the trek back had already started, since the place was deserted when we arrived, except for a young man on horseback who came galloping through the woods, exchanged a few words with my companions, and galloped off again: a real person on a real horse going about his real business.
David and I shouldered our knapsacks, said good-by to our driver and his companions and started walking. Very soon we were above the tree line, climbing on a path that followed the wide bed of a rock-strewn mountain stream. I could see that David was pacing himself so I could keep up with him. No wonder: he was thirty years old, and I was seventy!
I thought the path was quite steep, but after perhaps one hour, when once again I stopped to catch my breath, I happened to look up, and there looming before me, majestic and straight up, was the mountain we had to surmount to reach the pass into Daghestan. Up, and up, and up: I had to crane my neck back quite far to see the top of that barren mountain, the path zigzagging along its flank. David tried to reassure me: "It is not as far as it seems," he kept saying, "We'll be up in less than two hours." Well, perhaps he could do it in that time, but I had my doubts and rightly so: it would take me a good four hours with many stops, David patiently waiting for me along the way.
Half way up was another shepherd's hut, well guarded with barking dogs. They started their noisy barking while we were still quite far away, no doubt warning all and sundry about the invasion of these strange looking beasts coming up the mountain. And they barked, and they barked nonstop, until finally we got up to the hut, sat down, and talked to them. They reluctantly came close, smelled my hand, and accepted to be petted. There was water from a stream right beside the hut, which incidentally was much better built than the one down the valley. That water tasted delicious!
David then asked: "Would you prefer to have a snack here, or wait until we get to the top?" “But,” I said: "It looks still quite far away, and the path is becoming even steeper!" To which David replied: "No, it's not that far, we'll be there soon." So I agreed: "O.K. we'll eat later," and we went on our way.
Indeed it got steeper and steeper, and I reached the point when not only was my heart beating madly, but, try as I might, my legs refused to move! It had never, never happened to me before. I could take - I counted - 60 small steps, and then my legs would just go dead. Never mind going up: I could not even lift my knees. I managed by resting, then taking another 60 steps, then resting, repeating this painful pattern again and again. David became very concerned: "Will you be able to make it? Perhaps we should turn back," he offered. But I reassured him that I would make it, that he only had to give me time. And while I was struggling, what really hurt my feelings was that a bunch of cows, who hardly seemed to move their legs, contentedly chewing their cud, caught up from behind, passed me and leisurely continued climbing up the mountain, disappearing behind the trees!
Actually there was a reason why the cows started following us: part way up, seeing we would not reach the pass anytime soon, we stopped for something to eat. David left his knapsack some 30 feet from where we were sitting. I happened to turn around, and yelled: "David! A cow is stealing our bread!" He ran up, and wrestled the loaf of bread from the cow's mouth, rescuing about half. After that there was no stopping the herd: they all followed David and his knapsack, sometimes sneaking up to him from behind and nudging him, until he lost his patience and with stones and yells shoed them away; that is until they passed me going up the mountain!
Finally we got to the top. Pausing to look back, I could see the vast expanse of the grassy mountain dropping seemingly vertically under me, rocky ridges rearing here and there; far below meandered the bed of the mountain stream, in contrast appearing rather flat, and even lower the thick forest sloping toward an unseen horizon. The climb had taken me four and a half hours, instead of the one hour and a half that David had said it would take. As for the young man in Tbilisi who claimed he could climb it in 30 minutes, that's sheer Georgian boasting: even running all the way up no one could have done it in that time.
The weather was still very nice, the sun shining in an incredibly blue sky with scattered white clouds, but it was a bit chilly with a crisp breeze channeled by the rocky peaks looming on each side. "Up there is where we used to go to hunt ibex —Caucasian mountain goats", David told me. "That's a really challenging hunt, as they are very hard to approach. Now there are not so many, so we don't even try anymore."
On the pass we met a man on horseback coming our way. His name was Hamlet: There are quite a few Hamlets in Georgia, and also Othellos, Desdemonas, Ophelias: Oh, the far-flung Shakespearean influence! Our Hamlet, it turns out, was the shepherd who lived in the hut we had visited half way up the mountain. We chatted for a few moments. He asked David — under the impression I didn't understand Georgian: "How old is he?" To which I answered: "I am 70." "Oh, not bad," he said approvingly, but I don't know if he approved of my speaking some Georgian or of my climbing the mountain at that advanced age. Anyhow, before taking his leave he insisted upon giving me his walking stick, which came to be more useful than he ever expected! He had fashioned it from a tree branch and carved on its entire length intricate traditional Caucasian designs, into which he had incorporated his name in Georgian script.
The pass proper was perhaps one mile long. What a pleasure to walk on a more or less level surface, not to have to summon one's last ounce of energy just to raise one's knee for the next step. The path meandered between hillocks, alongside ponds of fresh water where our cows already were quenching their thirst. There were no trees, of course, since we were way above the tree line, but there were scattered bushes and many wild flowers. From the base of the rocks above came some shrill whistling: "Do you hear that?" asked David. "The marmots are objecting to our presence." We soon reached the other side of the pass, and for the first time I could contemplate the mountains of Daghestan rearing majestically as far as the eye could see.
All my life I had heard about Daghestan, with its lofty mountains, beauty, greatness, immensity, and its fierce mountaineers, most of whom are Sufis, a peculiarly esoteric branch of Islam. One of the most romantic figures of my childhood was the Imam Shamil, the famous Chechen-Daghestanian hero of the uprising of the North Caucasian tribes. Shamil fought the Russians for some 40 years, until he was finally captured and sent under escort to St. Petersburg, where he died in a somewhat golden captivity. Legend has it that after arriving in that town, Shamil was granted an interview with the Tsar. Having spent many weeks in a horse drawn carriage crossing the vast Russian steppes from the Caucasus to the Baltic, Shamil exclaimed: "Oh Great Tsar, you who own such immensity, why, oh why did your soldiers fight for so long in order to capture that insignificant kingdom of mine?"
From then on the walking was indeed much easier; the path followed the crests with a gentle gradient going down most of the way.
Like all mountain paths, it was basically just a few inches wide, often with a precipitous drop on one side or sometimes even on both sides.
After a while we reached a place where a few small streams crossed the path. "What about some lunch?" David asked. To which I replied, "How long to where we're going?" He explained that from where we were to the campsite would take about two more hours. "But at my speed?" I objected. "Well, probably three hours," he said. "But we have plenty of time. It's only one o’clock; there are still at least 6 hours of daylight." I thankfully unloaded my knapsack, David also. He had taken most of the supplies, so that his load was much heavier than mine. And in addition he carried his heavy rifle. We then partook of a leisurely lunch of suluguni cheese, sausage, fresh tomatoes and cucumber, and the bread the cows had kindly left us.
After a short rest, I got up to fill my canteen at one of the wonderful streams running down the mountain. As I was crossing a gently inclined flat rock, my left foot slid brutally sideways, the spikes on my soccer shoes failing to get a purchase. I didn't fall, but somehow this slide caused my right foot to twist severely. I felt a sharp pain shooting up my leg, sat down, hurriedly took off shoe and sock, and started massaging my ankle. David scrambled down and helped me apply cold compresses; indeed one of the streams was just a couple of feet away, and the water descending from the summits was ice cold, probably no more than 35 degrees.
Half an hour went by; my ankle was still in pain, but there was no swelling. I tried walking, leaning on Hamlet's providential stick. I could do it, but very slowly. We held a war council: what to do? The campsite, three hours away when I was OK, would now be too far to reach before nightfall, assuming I could walk the distance. To go back was out of the question, since the base was even farther away. From where we were we could see another shepherd's hut with sheep grazing on the slopes above it. David estimated that we could reach it in about one hour. It was in the same direction as the campsite. We decided to proceed. If, when we arrived close to the hut, my foot felt well enough, we would continue towards our original destination. If not, we would ask for shelter.
By the time we arrived at the nearest approach to the hut, my foot was getting worse: the ankle was quite swollen, and I could hardly hobble along. We decided to try to stop for the night. The hut was quite a ways down from the path, located at the bottom of a valley near a stream running between the mountains. The slope down was very steep, so much so that most of the way I had to slide on my backside. We had hardly started down when out of nowhere three dogs appeared, barking furiously, snarling, and approaching as much as they dared. They were just doing their job, guarding the sheep and warning of the presence of dangerous strangers, yet that nonstop barking was extremely annoying, even nerve wracking. Half way down I sat on a rock to rest, while David went ahead to investigate the situation. After a while he came back: "There was only a boy at the hut," he said, "the others are down by the stream washing their clothes and doing chores. But we are welcome to stay." And he added: "You know, these shepherds are not Georgian, they are Avar, so be careful: these people steal everything."
At that point it was only three o'clock. The valley was so deep and narrow that the hut was already in the shadows, so we stayed for a while where we were, in the sun. Toward six we went down to the hut, me sliding on my backside all the way. By that time we could see the shepherds returning, and the dogs had mercifully abandoned us to attend to their evening duty, which consisted of bringing the scattered sheep back to the compound all by themselves, without the help or direction of a human being.
Getting closer we could see that the shepherds' encampment consisted of a canvas tent, set on poles and anchored in the usual way, which we later learned was only for sleeping. Next to it was a sort of kitchen/living hut built of shoulder high walls of flat stones, with a canvas roof flopping in the wind. Inside a large flat stone served as a table, and all around other stones covered with mangy sheepskins served as seating. All in all, a scene straight out of the Flintstones! The stone walls were riddled with gaps through which the evening breeze merrily whistled. One wall was higher, in which a hearth had been hollowed for cooking. But there was no chimney, not even an opening above the hearth, so the smoke would billow right back into the "room", to eventually escape through the many holes in the canvas top and the walls. The system worked well enough, if you didn't mind a lot of smoke in your eyes—as seemed to be the case with our hosts.
So there we were in Daghestan. Our shepherds were Leke, one of the more than 40 national groups who live side by side in the territory. Each group has its own culture and its own distinct language, some of which are spoken by less than 10,000 people. Since the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century, the common language throughout the area has been Russian.
Our hosts Ahmed and Mohammed proved to be very hospitable: Mohammed led me inside the stone hut and handed me a Burkha, a marvelous cape made of tightly woven felt, reaching to the ankles. As soon as I put it over my shivering shoulders—the temperature in the shade must have been barely above freezing—I felt a welcome warmth spread throughout me.
Ahmed seemed to be in charge of domestic arrangements. While Mohammed and the boy, whose name I never did get, went out to lock the sheep in their corrals, Ahmed busied himself organizing things and cooking. But before that he explained to me in broken Russian, our only common language, that he had some talent for curing people, which he had inherited from his grandmother and his mother, who were very famous healers. (This is not a put down of his linguistic abilities. My Russian is just as broken as his, or even worse, but in a different way.)
"I am far from being as good as they are," he said," but I know a little, and I think I can help your ankle." He made me take off my shoe and sock, and very gently rubbed in some sort of cream he took out of an old glass jar. He went on massaging. "What I am doing is calming down the flesh that got bruised before the hurt reaches further and gives the bone the idea that it too should start feeling bad. Only then will I be able to attend to the real hurt," he explained. Very gently then, he massaged all around, slowly getting to where it was the most painful. He went on massaging that spot, while he directed Mohammed to take my foot in his hands and exert a steady pull at first, then in a semi rotary direction. That hurt a lot, but the kind of hurt that you know is good for you. Indeed after a few minutes the pain subsided. Ahmed then rubbed on more of his cream, to which he added a handful of salt, bandaged my ankle tightly and explained that I would feel much better in a few moments. To celebrate the occasion, David pulled from his knapsack a bottle of cognac, which we all proceeded to drink. Indeed my foot soon felt much better, but whether it was thanks to Ahmed's ministrations or the cognac, I couldn't say.
Night was coming. Ahmed threw more wood on the fire, above which he suspended a kettle full of water—the smoke all but smothering me to the point that I had to hobble outside. We were by that time in deep shadow, but the top of the mountain across from the stream was still in full sunlight. And there, way up, I could see two men leading a couple of horses slithering down the path. Mohammed explained that these were the other two shepherds who had left a few days before to look for a runaway horse. "Why did it take them so long to find the animal?" I asked. "They probably collared him right away", he said, "but then decided to go the village down the mountain. They'll be here by the time supper is ready." To my eyes they seemed very near, but indeed two full hours elapsed before they appeared in the hut.
When I came back into the hut, the water in the kettle was boiling, and Ahmed was washing dishes on the slab of rock that served as a table. It was perhaps four by six feet, fairly flat, with many names and other words engraved on its surface, some in Russian, one or two in Georgian, but most in a script I did not recognize—possibly Avar, Chechen, or Ingush. "We didn't have time to wash the dishes earlier," he apologized, “because we were busy doing our laundry and washing ourselves." He continued by way of explanation: "We are planning to go to the Geo
rgian village and then to Tbilisi as soon as our comrades return. Since you have a bad foot, we can take you with us on horseback." On horseback! On these mountain paths no wider than my hand! And I am no horseman; in fact my idea of mounting an animal is limited to a little donkey, not one of these big brutes! Yet if my foot would still be bad in the morning, I would have no choice... Oh well, qué será, será!
The dishes washed and the dirty water disposed of by the simple expedient of pouring it right under the "table"—where it promptly seeped away between the stones—Ahmed proceeded to make buns. From a burlap bag he poured a quantity of flour on the table, moistened it with water from a pitcher, made dough, and fashioned bread balls the size of tennis balls. As he finished each, he placed it on a rocky ledge I had not noticed before, right above the hearth, presumably so that it would be warm enough for the dough to rise. After replenishing the kettle and hanging it over the fire to boil, he went out to get our main dish: that turned out to be a sheep he slaughtered then and there by chopping off its head with one blow from his khandjal, a sort of short scimitar. He then skinned it, cleaned it, butchered it, and left the rough hewn pieces outside on top of a stone wall, not without throwing the offal to the dogs who had watched the operation with great interest.
Coming back in, he added wood to the fire, made sure the water was boiling, and one by one threw in the buns he had prepared. After about twenty minutes he started fishing them out. To make sure each was cooked he used a thin pointed bone with a small notch. This he would thrust into a bun and lift it. If the bun came out, it was cooked, if it slipped back in the water, it needed a little more time: simple, but efficient!
About that time the wandering shepherds appeared. They came into the hut, took off most of their outer clothes, which by the way were not at all picturesque, consisting of western suits with trousers and rather torn jackets covering sweaters underneath. After saying hello all around, they pulled out a bottle of chacha, a fiery brew favored in the Caucasus Mountains. Welcome it was despite the previous cognac, since by that time night had fallen, and it was now really cold with the wind still whistling merrily through the many holes of our walls. But I was quite content: the Burkha was keeping my body warm from the outside, while from within the chacha was working its wonders.
Once the bread was made, Ahmed added water to the kettle, and when it reached a boil, threw in slabs of lamb. They were merry, our shepherds. They had practically nothing, all their possessions being on their backs. The only sign of the 20th century was a small pocket radio that didn't work. Yet they felt content and rich. "Money? That's nothing," said Mohammed. "These days the kilo of lamb sells for 50, 60 rubles. What more can you ask?" And indeed at that time I had met many people whose salary was a 70 or 80 rubles a month!
Ahmed pronounced the meat ready, and everybody sat down for supper. My companion David pulled salami, cheese, and bread, out of his knapsack, which for our shepherds was a welcome change from their usual diet of boiled mutton and boiled buns. Mohammed kept offering me greasy slabs of meat, saying: "Eat! Eat! You have to eat the fat, it's good for you!" And indeed I remembered that, when I was twenty years old in war-torn France with little to eat, any fat, animal or vegetable, tasted just marvelous! I must say, however, that this evening my stomach was not too happy with all that greasy boiled mutton, particularly since the head of the sheep with its raw smells had been positioned on the wall right next to my face. But with chacha flowing freely, we all had a merry time in that smoky stone hut with only the fire in the hearth for illumination.
Ahmed said that he and Mohammed wanted to get to Tbilisi to buy a few supplies, since within a few days it would be time to start the long trek back home to Mahakhala. "How many days will that take?" I asked. "Perhaps 20 days or more, depending on the weather," replied one of the shepherds. "You know, sheep don't walk very fast, and you have to give them time to graze on the way." Ahmed and Mohammed said that the others would start the trek without them, and that they would catch up later with the supplies. That's why Ahmed and Mohammed were taking horses along. "But only one of them is strong enough for you to mount. The others are just pack horses," explained Ahmed.
I retired before the others. They kindly gave me some sort of straw pad to put under me in the sleeping tent, and with my sleeping bag and the Burkha to keep me warm, I promptly fell asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night half frozen. The Burkha had slipped off, and no matter how I tried to arrange it, a part of me remained cold…until it dawned on me to install the Burkha under me, since the cold was seeping up from the ground. It must have been close to freezing, and the thin mountain air probably contributed to my discomfort. Yet I fell asleep again and woke up to another glorious day.
What a sight! We were still in the shadows, but above us the sun illuminated the mountains, and the sheep were scattered on the green slopes like balls of fluff. Already smoke was rising from our "living-room kitchen", and soon Ahmed called us for a breakfast of what else? Boiled mutton and water. No tea, no coffee.
David had not slept at all. After supper he had gone down to the creek to lie in ambush for bears. The shepherds told us that indeed bears would come up the stream from below and try to sneak into the pen to snare a sheep. The dogs were always on watch, of course, but nevertheless once in a while the bears succeeded.
"They are very intelligent," said Mohammed. "One of them would creep close on one side, so that the dogs would rush in that direction, barking madly, and then another bear would sneak in on the other side! Also, I don't know how they would know, but if there would be a gun in the encampment, the bears wouldn’t come close. Perhaps they can smell the powder or the oil on the gun?" And indeed David, armed with his rifle, stayed in ambush the whole night in vain.
Departure time came. My foot was still hurting quite a bit, and I could hardly put any weight on it. A horse it would be! My only previous experience on horseback was climbing up to the Citadelle in Haiti. There, however, the road was wide enough for a jeep to go through, and on the steepest parts I could dismount and walk alongside. But here...
My horse was very quiet, very steady, but remembering the narrow paths we came on, I was rather apprehensive. The first part was uphill, not too steep, which is a lot easier on horseback than going downhill—at least for me. Ahmed was leading my horse by the bridle, but even so in quite a few places I had to dismount and climb around rocky spurs as best I could, since the horse could barely make it through on its own.
We went along the mountain path, and in two hours we reached the pass on top of the huge mountain that it had taken me over four hours to climb. What a sight! What a slope! No way would I be able to negotiate my way back down on horseback. Indeed the horses had a hard time making it on their own. I dismounted, and, ignoring the zigzagging path, preceded straight down hill on my behind, my bad foot up in the air. It was so steep in places that—remembering an old technique from my mountaineering days in the Alps—I would crouch on one foot, lean my body backwards on Hamlet's stick, and let myself slide downhill in a small avalanche of pebbles, controlling my speed by putting more or less weight on the stick. With faithful David keeping a watchful eye on me, I thus got to the bottom much faster than I went up. I think the total drop was at most 1500 meters, five times the Empire State Building, but it seemed like a lot more.
At the shepherd's hut midway down I could mount again, and we continued down the steep path, me leaning way back with the stirrups almost to the horse's head, while it prudently negotiated its way among boulders and rolling stones. Finally we reached the place where the truck had dropped us off the day before. David explained: "We have a choice now. We can camp here until tomorrow, when the truck is slated to come back to pick us up. Or we can continue, and we'll somehow manage to reach the village by early afternoon. It's up to you."
I felt fine: I had expected my behind to be sore from bopping on a horse and bouncing down the mountain, but no, all was well, so we decided to proceed. From this poin
t on the path was alongside the stream, meandering though a thick forest. What a delightful ride! It was still going downhill, but not so steeply. No more rolling stones and rocks to negotiate, no more deep chasms on each side threatening to engulf me. Now I could relax, and enjoy the balmy weather and the sensation of proceeding forward with no effort on my part, a living body under me doing all the work.
In a short time we came upon a group of men busy slaughtering a bull, whose severed head had been placed on a tree stump right there on the path, clouds of flies buzzing angrily about. They gave us directions to a farm one hour away, where they would soon bring the meat, and from where a tractor could take us to the village where we had spent the night before. The weather was still splendid; the sun shone brightly between the branches. The path was mostly in the shade, occasionally crossing the river bed. The little horse knew the way without anyone guiding it, unerringly choosing the right path at the infrequent crossings. Ahmed taught me how to tell the horse to stop or go forward: strangely, these "words” or rather noises, sounded exactly the same as what I remembered from my childhood in France. Thus I tried my French on the horse, and it worked! Do horses the world over speak the same language?
Soon we reached the farm, where our shepherds arranged to leave the horses until they came back. Presently a tractor pulling a wagon rumbled into life, and we all piled in. The ride to the village took another two hours, at a speed of 6 miles an hour at best. The scenery was extraordinarily beautiful: meadows, fields, forests, streams, all lush and green, filled with flowers, and the stark mountains of the Caucasus looming in the background. But what a shaky ride! Of course the wagon had no suspension, so that while the road was not too bad, every bump or gully sent shocks up my spine. To spare my bad ankle I had to stand on one foot all the way, hanging onto the high sides of the wagon with both hands. By the time we got to our destination, I was exhausted. Give me a horse any time!
We got off at the entrance to the village, as the tractor was going to an outlying farm. Ahmed and Mohammed had brought a bag with perhaps 20 - 25 kilos of mutton to sell or swap. That was their only luggage, even though they intended to be away several days. In general people here go traveling with no luggage, only what they have on their backs. It is for us surprising: we are so used to lugging all kinds of gear that we forget how much easier it is to take nothing at all. So what if one has to wear the same clothes for a few days?
David went to get his car, which he had left at his friends' house. It was an old battered Soviet made Lada that had seen better days, with broken windows, holes in the floor, crumbling seats, non-existent suspension. Yet it felt like the height of luxury after the truck, the horse, and that horribly bumpy ride in the tractor-pulled wagon. We all piled in, dropped the shepherds at their friends’ house, and proceeded to the house where we had stayed before. Our hostess again prepared an excellent dinner, and we spent a very nice evening recounting our adventures and speculating on the political situation. She wanted us to stay with them for a few days: "It gets a little boring when we do not have guests."
That house was very interesting: it was quite substantial, made of stone, with two stories. The ground floor consisted of a large kitchen, a dining room, and a sort of living room, I say "sort of", because the ground was beaten earth. Yet the furniture was solid and good. The second story was surrounded by a balcony on all four sides, which overhung the ground floor, providing shade and shelter. There was electricity, but no running water. Our hostesses kept a supply of water in pails, which a boy fetched for them every morning from a hand pump several hundred feet away. There was of course no bathroom, but rather an outhouse, with a simple hole in the center of a sloping cement floor. With my bad foot it was not too easy to manage! The house was surrounded by a vegetable garden with tall corn stalks and fruit trees. Squawking chickens and a couple of pigs kept getting under foot outside, but none of them dared set a paw inside the house. Everything was very clean, and smelled good with nature's bounty. I understood that the owners lived in Tbilisi, but would spend four months of summer here in the village.
We were to leave in the morning for the capital, but departure proved not to be easy, in part because I had to take care of my foot, which did not feel any better, and in part because of Georgian hospitality. It was Sunday and people were getting together for a Sunday fete. After a substantial breakfast we went to pick up our shepherd friends. It was only about ten in the morning, but already their hosts were throwing a keipi (dinner) outside in their yard with over 25 persons sitting, eating, and drinking! They all greeted us vociferously, insisted on kissing me and honoring me as the first American to ever come to their village. We had to sit down with everybody, drink our way through many toasts in the Georgian manner, even though we all were keen to be on our way. When we finally managed to say goodbye other neighbors were waiting for us outside. They tried to take us to their own house "just for ten minutes". We well knew, however, that these ten minutes really meant three hours, so at the risk of being rude, we made our excuses and managed to go on our way, David driving, me next to him, and in the back our two shepherds and an older lady who was going back to Tbilisi with us.
We made it back to the city in due time, not without my having to drive for a while because David kept falling asleep at the wheel. I knew he had not slept the night before, but what had he been doing last night? I did not dare ask. Driving his car was quite an experience: it was very, very cramped, so that I had trouble shifting my foot from gas pedal to brake. The fact that it was my bad foot didn't help. The wheel was terribly loose, and the brakes quite slippery. I did all right, however, but when we reached Tbilisi and the traffic became much heavier, I woke up David. I was not about to drive in town with all these crazy Georgian drivers who zoom through red lights, while often unexpectedly stopping at the green! "Why do they do that?" I asked David, who explained. "You never know when one of these maniacs will go right through the red, so we stop at the green just in case."
The following day David brought Ahmed and Mohammed to visit me. They had had haircuts, had shaven, and altogether looked respectable. At first they were quite subdued in what was for them a luxurious suite in a hotel. But I put out wine and other goodies, and soon they became their usual selves. "You know, we thought we would find many things we needed in such a big city, but the stores are empty! We have the money, but cannot spend it!" they told me with great surprise. "Six months ago we could get everything!" This shows how swiftly the economy was disintegrating. After awhile I took them out to a comparatively lavish dinner in a cooperative (non-government) restaurant to try to repay a little of their hospitality, and before we said goodbye gave them a small radio, a flashlight, and my Swiss army knife. They were delighted and made me promise that next time I came to the Soviet Union I would visit them in their home town Mashakhala, the capital of Daghestan on the Caspian Sea.
Thus ended my so-called hunting expedition in the Caucasus. I was extremely pleased that things had turned out the way they did. If I hadn't twisted my foot, I would never have sampled the hospitality of Daghestanian shepherds, never experienced the way they lived in the mountains, and David would have remained with his prejudices against all Avars and Lekes. Now he knew that they were good people, that they were not inveterate thieves, as he had thought. He said that if the next year he would go hunting, he would make a point of finding their camp and bringing them some gifts.
Alas, David never went back. The following June, as he was standing guard over the television station, a small band of the deposed President Gamsakhurdia’s supporters staged a raid. They were easily repulsed, but David was killed, the action's only casualty. Even sadder: he had just been awarded a scholarship to study law in the United States, as he had always dreamed to do, starting in October...
_____________________________
2. Closing The Circle
Lanshkhuti, Republic of Georgia, November 1990
They stood to the side. In a semi-circle. Talk
ing in whispers. Respecting my silence. Respecting my retreat into the tumultuous memories summoned by the stone jutting out of the fading grass. “The circle has been comp1eted... seventy years already... But the circle has been, finally, completed...” A circle without a beginning, although it had clearly reached its end. A circle closed upon itself, holding me the man, me the child, whole at long last within myself. “They tried to erase all traces of your family,” I had been told many times.
“They” were the Georgian communists, those Makharadze, Orjonikidze, Stalin, who seven long decades ago had helped organize the Red Army invasion, the conquest of their own country by the Russian Soviet forces. “Your father’s house was here,” pointing to a grassy lot where a pair of long-haired black piglets were scurrying, hunting for chestnuts.
“They even demolished your grandfather’s and your brother’s graves,” that brother I never knew, but whose ghost overshadowed my whole childhood. “All that remains is this corner of a headstone stubbornly sticking out of the ground. And they didn’t think to chop down the magnolia your father planted. There it is, regal now, behind the flower stand.”
That autumn Sunday the village of Lanshkhuti was almost deserted. The local soccer team was playing that day in Tbilisi, the capital, in what was the most important match of the season; and all the locals, led by the town dignitaries, had set out to support their heroes. No mayor, prefect, police chief, party secretary. I was relieved: there would be no solemn ceremonies, no official banquet lasting for hours, no long-winded hypocritical speeches, as generally happened whenever I was recognized. We had done well not to announce our visit. Undoubtedly the first visit in seventy years of the son of the late Georgian President to his father’s village would not have failed to spur an overwhelming program of celebrations. Georgian hospitality is not known for moderation: for them, too much is not enough!
It was precisely to avoid this that we had arrived unannounced from Batumi. “We” included my childhood friend Thina, with whom I had been raised in Paris, and whom I had not seen for some 45 years. She had settled in Batumi, a nearby seaside resort. With her came several relatives and friends, since no one does anything alone here; and from Tbilisi, specially for that occasion, had come my relatives Tsira and Marina Gugushvili, together with Leo Jordania, and his wife. Leo was one of Lanshkhuti’s most famous sons: at a young age he had become a celebrated soccer player, member of the Georgian national team. Now, that is fame!
All told, ten people considered it their honor and duty to escort me for what was ostensibly my first encounter with the paternal village. They did not realize that of still greater significance for me was confronting the memory of my older brother Andreika. He had died at the age of twelve, before I was born, yet in some way created me, since he wanted a little brother to be named Redjeb, after a great-grandfather of that name whose character and adventurous life he greatly admired.
My father and his friends had often spoken to me about Lanshkhuti, which represented the center of their lives, the locus of their childhood. The details escape me, after so many years, but the impression remained that it was a small village surrounded by fields, where among others lived a whole clan of Jordanias divided into some twenty families, descendants of a common ancestor who had settled there in the 18th century. I remember a certain knoll that the locals had dubbed “Jordania hill”, also known as “the Hillock of Thought”. There the men gathered towards dusk to solve the world’s problems and share the local news, while the women, in the kitchens, ground walnuts and corn before cooking the evening meal.
It is unlikely that these Jordanias were industrious. Nature is generous in Georgia, and little effort is required to harvest its riches. My mother, who was Russian, often told me how, when she first came to Lanshkhuti, she could ot but ask, after a few days: “But where are the peasants?”, since she never saw anyone working the fields.
I thus had the impression that Lanshkhuti was but a small village. What a surprise to discover that it was rather a small town, which its inhabitants had ironically but affectionately nicknamed “little Paris.” There were fields, all right, but far away, on the outskirts. And my ancestral home—or rather ancestral lot, since the house no longer exists — is located right in the center of town, on the main street, next to City Hall.
The house, which I know only through photographs, was typical of the Guria province, where winters are mild and snowfalls scarce and far-between. It was a one-story wooden house, adorned with a covered porch, standing on a stone platform, and had no basement. One can see houses like that in the villages, still inhabited, but now with electricity and running water. And some unique exemplars have been preserved in ethnographic museums with all the housekeeping details of an extinct lifestyle. Now that the communism is a thing of the past,— we hope for ever—, the city fathers are contemplating establishing a museum in honor of my father and locating it in a replica of the demolished house on its original site.
I find it curious that although the communists demolished house and grave, inexplicably they left the lot vacant, erecting nothing more substantial than a small flower stand. They even left undisturbed the grove of trees and the magnolia that my father supposedly planted ~— an anecdote that seems to me rather apocryphal. True, a tea factory built in the thirties extends onto the property, but only minimally. I also find it interesting that despite their hatred for the Jordanias and the Mensheviks in general, the Bosheviks allowed my grandmother Cristiné to live and die in that same house.
When my parents were forced onto exile in 1921, they wanted to take her with them, but she refused: “I well know that if I don’t go with you I’1l loose my son and my grandchildren, whom I may never see again. But if I do go, I’ll lose my home, my village, my country, my reason for being...” She thus stayed on, and lived six more years until 1927 without being harassed in any way; it was only after her death that the Bolsheviks destroyed both house and gravesite. It makes one think that in those times even they had a sense of decency.
My grandmother was not buried in the garden, since that was no longer allowed, but in a small cemetery in town. The cemetery was later demolished and replaced by a park with a chi1dren’s playground. As for my grandmother’s remains, no one knows what became of them...
Thus it was that in November 1990 I stood before the remnants of the grave, in what had been the garden of my father’s house, now an untended lot where a grove of slender trees reaches to the sky, including that famous magnolia supposedly planted by my father, in front of which romantically stands a flower kiosk. Nothing marked the spot, except for what appeared to be the corner of an ordinary stone sticking out of the short grass.
“This is actually the tombstone underneath which Andreika and Nikoloz have been put to rest,” Leo explained. “We always knew it, but no one ever dared mark the spot in any way or do anything about it. You have no idea what a handicap it was to be a Jordania. It was difficult or impossible to find work; many Jordanias were deported to Siberia, never to be heard of again.
“Children in school were taunted by their comrades, and you know how hard this is for children. Myself, if I had been born earlier, I never could have become a national team soccer player. It is only because Stalin had died, and de-Stalinization took place, with the profound change of attitudes that went with it, that I could succeed. Before that time, my name would have kept me down, as it did many.”
Yes, it was for me a trying moment to find myself for the first time in my ancestral village in front of the grave of that 12 -year- old boy who for all eternity will remain the big brother I never knew. He got hurt while playing “giant’s steps,” a game that consisted of a sort of carrousel revolving high over head around a central pole, and long straps suspended from it—like a May pole. Children would hang onto these straps, running in circles, and when momentum was created, would take giant steps, touching ground only at wide intervals. My brother fell, got a concussion, meningitis followed and, given the state of medi
cine in those times, died. What a tragedy to die so young! For him, for my parents, and also for me, even though I was not yet born...
When I was a child, I hated Andreika. I hated him because his presence in our house was overwhelming. There was a painting of him on his deathbed hanging over my father’s bed. There was a sculpture of him dominating the salon, downstairs. And my mother was always telling me how good he was, for ever holding him up to me as an example: everything he did was admirable, and I was made to feel totally worthless in comparison. Poor Andreika! He was only a small boy, when he died; he never did anything to me. Yet there it was...
I thought I had long ago exercised these childish emotions, but there must have been something remaining, since they came surging back with such force. My whole childhood flooded my mind in an instantaneous surge, all my family stories suddenly surfaced. The edge of time past rejoined the present to become a single entity: The circle had been closed! Yes, the circle was, at long last, complete! The physical circle, that brought my flesh back to the place from which it had sprung; and the emotional chasm that had so long remained between my brother and me, the unknowing, was finally bridged. Yes, that circle too was at last completed. Yes, finally I could see Andreika as the small boy he had been, carefree, enjoying life, that small boy who used to tell our parents:
“If I ever get a little brother, I want him to be called Redjeb.” And indeed I was born, and my name is Redjeb, and I am now seventy years old and I am standing on the spot where the flesh of my flesh returned to the earth that nurtured it for so many generations.
I stood deep in thought for I don’t know how long; stepped towards the kiosk; selected an armful of flowers — Leo rushed forward in order that I not pay — and laid them on the mossy edge of that stone that nothing distinguished from any other. I meditated for a few more moments: no, I wouldn’t let myself be overcome here, in front of everybody; no, with a great effort, I bound my childhood memories in a mental shield and put them aside for later.
And I returned to this life, to the friends, the relatives who were waiting there for me, and we continued on our way, the air of Lanshkhuti sweet to my soul...
__________________________
3. The Music Lesson
When I was growing up music played an important role in our home. I mean live music, no matter how badly sounding from a mediocre piano played by clumsy fingers, or how badly warbled by uncertain voices. It was so much more intimate and touching within these limitations than those well-organized, high quality sounds that nowadays reach us so easily from all sides. It was the era of stammering radios, of 78 rpm records made of fragile Bakelite that could play for three minutes top, of mechanical phonographs, of movies that had just learned to talk. It was the time when the film “Carnegie Hall”, with Leopold Stokowski at the podium with its “living” sound transmitted via screen and loudspeakers, filled the crowds with enthusiasm, even those who normally had little appreciation for symphonic orchestras.
Perhaps we had a radio at that time, but I don’t remember it at all, undoubtedly because it rarely broadcast concerts. But on the other hand, I clearly remember the day when a friend of my father gave us an electric record player. What marvel of marvels! It was no longer necessary to hand-crank the spring, and the sound itself was so much superior! Our first records were the Red Army Chorus and A Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky; we were amazed by the dynamic contrasts from pianissimo to fortissimo, contrasts that had been impossible on the old phonographs.
But it was live music that remained our daily fare. Our parlor was dominated by a magnificent upright piano, large, heavy, ornamented, topped by candelabras, with a deep and powerful sound that bathed our neighborhood with its sonorous waves… so much the worse for them! – the corner grocer would tell my sister: “Your brother plays so well! We can hear him all the way here!”
When my sister was six or seven, she began to take piano lessons, like all the girls from good families. As I was three years younger, and a boy, I was not included. But undoubtedly out of jealously as much as desire, I insisted on hitting the piano keys all by myself, so that by five or six years of age I also gained the right to take lessons!
As my sister got older, she gave up music to throw herself into the study of metallurgic engineering. She was part of the first graduating class of the Girls’ Polytechnic School, which disappeared once women were fully admitted to the regular Polytechnic. But I continued with the piano. I took classes in harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and composition, principally with Nicolas Stein, a flamboyant musician. I was his star pupil—which was not difficult now that I think about it—since I was the only one who remained loyal to him throughout the years, given his very peculiar attitude toward the teaching of music.
The least that one can say is that our lessons were far from being regular or conventional. How many times did I arrive at his house at the prescribed hour to find no one there, or to hear a sleepy voice groan, “Excuse me, I overslept. Would you mind terribly much coming back next week? I worked really late last night!” It wasn’t until later that I realized that what he called “work” was more often than not painting the town with some dancer. He loved women, to the great consternation of his wife, Sonia, who had been my piano teacher when I was much younger. As he had chosen to work with ballet companies, a world in which most of the men are gay, the companionship of young women was something that he never lacked, especially as he was very good looking, in the Russian style: broad shoulders, powerful chest, clean-shaven face. He also had the good fortune to wear his naturally silvery hair combed straight back à la Leopold Stokowski. He was between 35 and 40 years old when I first knew him, and his appearance remained almost exactly the same right up to his elderly days.
Like any good Russian, he very much liked to drink, often to the point of not knowing anymore what he was doing or where he was, even and especially in circumstances where he had to make a good impression in his own best interests. A nihilistic character? Nerves? In any case, he had a definite genius for throwing away any opportunity where he might have utilized his talents to their fullest. So that maybe why he always remained a satellite, so to speak, of the ballet maestros; either as an accompanist or as an arranger and orchestrator, tasks that in which he actually excelled. And naturally, busying himself helping the young ballerinas, a job that he was fond of and one that often rewarded him handsomely in more ways than one.
In spite of all this, Nicolas and I managed to make contact once or twice per month, but then it wasn’t a simple lesson, but a veritable marathon, often lasting the entire day, from ten in the morning until late in the evening. We went over everything: piano technique, interpretation, fingering skills, Buddhism, harmonic analysis, Gurdjieff, counterpoint, esoterism, science fiction, orchestration, art history, folklore—all of it intermixed with musical anecdotes, gossip about the star dancers and ballerinas he worked with; mystical considerations, which all led right back to Music with a capital M: center of the world, center of the universe, which throughout all his vicissitudes remained ever his great passion.
Thus Nicolas opened up unknown territories for me, offered me unheard-of visions, made me penetrate the great composers with all my senses… but I can’t say that my musical studies with him were very solid technically. He was quite aware of this, and so to compensate, he had me take private lessons in harmony and counterpoint with a certain Professor Becker of the Conservatory, who was his absolute antithesis: dressed formally, precise, and seemingly without a trace of humor or imagination. I went to take my lessons with him at his ever neat and orderly apartment that perfectly reflected his total lack of personality: a real petit bourgeois.
That was during the war, in the wintertime. I would arrive at his house in the morning, led by his wife to the parlor where he gave my lessons, and where a coal stove occupied the place of honor. This was nothing unusual, since with the restrictions there wasn’t any other way to obtain heat, even if the building had, in th
eory, central heating. Monsieur Becker would arrive, and without saying a word, would take a piece of kindling paper that was prepared in advance, bring it to the stove and light it with his cigarette lighter. Then he would insert the paper into the stove and without hesitation, without checking to see if the fire had caught on, he would turn to me and begin the lesson. In fact, the fire correctly caught on without fail: I had the feeling that the fire would never dare to back up into this room, with its ever so polished and precise décor! Soon a discreet warmth began to spread, just enough to feel that the stove was functioning. Because it would never have been appropriate to get a roaring fire going: waste fuel? What a horror!
Without really being conscious of how cold I was, as the lesson advanced, I felt more and more uncomfortable. Thus, at the end of one hour, as soon as Monsieur Becker rose to signal the end of the lesson, I instantly ran out, and headed numb into the metro in order to warm myself up. In wartime Paris the underground tunnels of the metro were one of the rare places where the temperature was relatively comfortable: even the libraries and the cafés were glacial. In fact, it was not unusual for me to install myself on a bench in a station and stay there for an hour or two with a book, my lessons or a newspaper. I had my favorite stations, be it for the good lighting and overall good conditions or especially because they were perceptibly warmer than the others. La Concorde, on the Porte de Vanves – La Chapelle line, was one, also Saint Michel, which was often the meeting place for me and my friends, or Montparnasse.
Nicolas’ home was, on the other hand, total chaos: sheet music parts opened here and there, music scores stacked up on the piano, books scattered all over, dishes and plates piled up in the sink or simply forgotten in some corner, with bottles filled to varying degrees and, naturally, overflowing ashtrays right and left. His apartment was in Boulogne, on the seventh floor, with an open view of the Seine and the Renault factory. Years later, when I became an adult, or nearly, I would stop by from time to time, no longer as a student, but as a friend. As in the past, our discussions revolved around music, now washed down with wine and vodka.
One wartime evening, as Nicolas and I abandoned ourselves to some rather strong musical libations, suddenly a magnificent bombardment took place right before our eyes, right there outside our windows: the Allies were bombing the Renault factory! I use the word “magnificent” advisedly, because if for a moment one reduced all the enormous human suffering and destruction to mere abstractions, the bombing offered an astonishing spectacle of Son et Lumière — Sound and Light. (Is where they got the idea?)
Searchlights crisscrossing the sky; rumbling aircraft motors; flak tracing red, green, and blue trails; flares descending slowly in groups, suspended by their parachutes – they were called Christmas trees, because of the resemblance in shape and brilliance — the sparkling of the bursting shells against the black depth of the night, the deep coughing of the anti-aircraft cannons, the crackling noise of a hail of shrapnel as it fell crackling onto roofs and sidewalks, the clacking of machine guns. And on top of that, that night from Nicolas’ seventh floor windows, one could add the marvelous view of the fires that sprang up here and there, the glowing columns of smoke that rose, the scraps of iron and debris that flew up high even before the thunder of the explosions reached our ears through the general cacophony: Concrete music before it got its name, Wagnerian backdrops for an apocalypse of the soul. Anyway, these were the Allies, our friends, that were dropping bombs; they couldn’t possibly harm us!
I believe that we went insane: yelling about the harmonies of the sounds that were reaching us, howling about the wonder of it all, Nicolas or I or both of us running to the piano to pound out booming chords in counterpoint to the explosive sounds so close, grinning at the emotions in us that came tumbling out with the blasts and explosions, singing to the tinkling splinters of glass shattering all around us. We drank to the Allies, to the Music, to the airplanes, to the Absolute Spectacle that had been given to us to absorb. And not for one second did we have the slightest feeling of danger.
The bombardment ended. Fires raged under our windows, the pin-pon of fire trucks and the sirens of ambulances lulled us; exhausted, drunk, we fell asleep.
In the morning, we soberly took note that all the windows had been shattered, the furniture overturned; even the piano had been blasted to the center of the room. The floor was covered with plaster and glass shards, the walls and the ceiling showed great gashes, and the façade of the building was pockmarked by shrapnel and machine-gun fire. We learned that all the inhabitants had taken refuge in the basement, and that only Nicolas and I had remained upstairs, spectator-participants, exposed like no one else, way up on our seventh floor.
Truly blessed are fools, drunkards and musicians!
_______________________________
4. My Mother was a Cat
Anush was a Persian Blue. I cannot picture her in my mind as the kitten she must have been when she first appeared in my young life. For me she will always be the Mother Cat, affectionate but stern. Not only was she a mother to her own offsprings, whom she fabricated twice a year regular as clockwork, but she was also a mother to me, to the family dog, and even to a sick chicken that my mother installed under the kitchen sink in an attempt to save its life. Anush adopted it immediately, and I carry inside me the image of this tiny yellow chick tucked between the enormous front paws of that monster cat who licked it tenderly while it kept sneezing because the whiskers tickled its nose. I do not remember what happened to the chicken; for all I know, it died of old age, since my mother tended to keep her pet poultry and rabbits forever.
Soon another addition to our household appeared: Minush, who, for some reason, was the only one of Anush’s offspring to remain with us. Minush was also a Persian Blue, -- by some vagary of genes, since Anush was by no means choosy about her suitors. But while Anush remained always slender and quick-moving, Minush was plump, slow, and easy-going; and while Anush’s expression was always firm, stern, and decisive, Minush’s remained at all times vague and somewhat nonplussed. Of course Anush lorded it over Minush, never allowing her to forget the respect and obedience that parents were then used to expect from their children.
Twice a year, for as long as I can remember, Anush and Minush would disappear for days at a time in response to the ancient call of nature. Anush would reappear first, prim and proper, as if nothing had happened. Minush would come back days later, unashamed of the state she was in: sloppy, dirty, mangy, her fur matted here and there by some unspeakable goo, -- no doubt, given the smell, the result of some male cat’s possessive spraying. Usually she would be given a bath. A bath! To a cat! But then, Minush was in such a state of bliss and exhaustion that she didn’t seem to mind. The bath was of course necessary before allowing her in the house. One whiff of her interesting fragrance would have been enough to chase even a skunk away!
With free access to the big wide world yonder, both Anush and Minush would become pregnant and give birth at practically the same time. In those days it was the custom to get rid of all but one kitten out of each litter (I never wondered how), since to eliminate them entirely would be cruel to the mother, and who could afford to take care of them all? A brief calculation shows that if each litter consists of an average of four kittens, half of which are female, a single mother cat would beget 1458 offsprings in three years! This system worked quite well with Minush, who could not count.
But Anush knew quite well when she didn’t have her right number of babies. Not being given to complaints, she’d take action: she would find Minush’s nest, grab the lone kitten that was there, and bring it to her own secret abode. Even if she could not count, though, poor Minush well knew the difference between the positive and the negative, between one or more kittens and no kitten at all. But she could never figure out what had happened, and there she was forlornly wandering throughout the house wailing her sorrows. In self-defense, everybody would embark on a hunt to find Anush’s hiding place, grab that ex
tra kitten, and return it to Minush so she would shut up. Of course, as soon as Minush had to leave her baby even for a few moments, there was Anush kidnapping it anew, and the whole rigmarole had to be gone through again.
Not only would Anush rule Minush and whichever kittens happened to be living with us, but she would ·also terrorize the neighborhood dogs, and of course the family pooch, Lady. Lady was black, nondescript, temperamental, and given to snip at people from behind. She had a perennial skin affliction which was usually treated with some foul-smelling substance, and, despite many attempts, refused to have anything to do with any male dog, so that she remained a virgin all her life.
In theory Lady lived in a sort of doghouse under the porch’s stone steps. In practice she lived in the basement where, in winter, she would find a comfortable nook right next to the furnace. Lady had thus no particular attachment to her private apartments under the porch, except twice a year: that was when Anush decided to take them over as a perfect place to raise her offsprings. Lady would then feel being taken advantage of, and would bother the whole neighborhood with her moans and whimpers, not daring to come anywhere near her doghouse, from the entrance of which Anush would be calmly watching her antics.
This would go on for some weeks. Then, the kittens old enough to go out and play, Anush would abandon the doghouse, in which Lady would immediately loose all interest. By then, though, she had learned her lesson anew, and would never dare harm the kittens, who used to play with her tail or clamber all over her, Anush, never entirely trustful, vigilantly sitting by her head as if to say :”Behave yourself, or else!”
I have only faint recollections of being caressed or kissed by my mother, nor do I remember any particular feelings of tenderness and confidence towards her. Not that she did not love me in her own way, but she was always busy with politics as well as with the chores of everyday living. She was in fact quite a remarkable woman whom I learned to accept and respect later in life. Is that why I used to feel closer to animals and children than to adults, even when I became one myself?
In any case it is upon Anush and Minush that I bestowed my affections and from whom I received the warmth and emotional support that I didn’t get from the family circle. How many times have I not buried my face in the moist and fragrant fur of Anush’s belly? How many times did I not confide in her, protected by her purring presence, the childish sorrows that descended upon me, which I only know begin to realize influenced so much my whole life? To wake up in the morning surrounded by the warm presence of my two mother-cats was to color the day with diaphanous light. Minush used to crawl under the sheet and settle alongside my legs, occasionally kicking a fuss because she would forget how to crawl out again... while Anush, more independent-minded, would settle on the pillow right against my head, which would reverberate with her approving purrs...
One of the happiest memories of my childhood comes back fresh to my mind. I open my eyes, wide awake. Moonlight is streaking into my bedroom through the half open French window. On the night—table next to me is Anush, straight and intent. Minush is in her usual sloppy sitting posture at the foot of the bed. Rhythmic dull sounds break the stillness: it is Lady’s tail thumping on the carpet. Several kittens are madly playing throughout the room. (Why more than two? I don’t know.) They bounce from bed to table and from rug to chair, they run across my body, they sneak through Lady’s legs. Well trained by Anush, Lady doesn’t dare take part in the game, but follows it with great attention. It is a living painting, suspended in an eternal instant.
I think I am remaining awake, but I must have fallen asleep since all of a sudden the scene has changed without my being aware that time has elapsed. The moon rays reach the room in a much sharper slant. In instant before they traced an oblong on the floor, now they stretch thinly across table and chair. There is a black stain on the rug: Lady, sleeping all curled-up. The kittens also are sleeping, bunched together in the hollow of my knees. Minush is still at the foot of the bed, but Anush has disappeared. I just know she’s at work, patiently waiting in front of a mouse hole somewhere, a posture she’s quite able to sustain for a whole day and night without twitching a whisker. The room is now completely silent. I feel surrounded by the living warmth of my tribal friends. Calm, drowsiness, fading moon-rays... In the morning I go to school, all alone.
Even as a child playing the piano was for me a source of joy but also, all too often, a real chore: to study the piano while my buddies were playing soccer or wandering the streets, having fun? What slavery! But there was no escaping: everyday, no matter what, my mother would oblige me to practice for a least a whole long hour. While I was thus chained to the piano bench, my two cats never failed to help me bear my fate.
I can still see myself practicing Czerny’s exercises, these little horrors, with Minush sprawled on my knees, drowsily purring, and Anush perched on top of our old upright piano all a-carve with cherubs and rococo ornaments —- perhaps the most handsome instrument I have ever seen. Anush must have liked the vibrations, since she would assume a posture quite uncharacteristic of her anywhere else: stretched on her belly, her front paws dangling right in front of the score I was supposed to be studying. Both cats would stay put as long as I was practicing, so that I would sometimes lengthen my daily penance so as not to disturb my furry music lovers.
I don’t remember exactly when and how our long association came to an end. I was over 20 years old, probably closer to 23. My parents were still living in the same house with Anush and Minush. Lady had disappeared long before, hit by a bus, I was told. As befitted my young manhood I used to wander the world, living here and there, but always coming back for a day or two at a time.
When I was back the old relationship with my mother-cats resumed as if no time had passed, including playing the piano with Minush on my lap and Anush perched on top. Eventually my returns became less and less frequent. During that period, somehow, somewhere, Anush and Minush departed the house and life, discreetly, all by themselves, as proper cats are wont to do.
My mother lived on many years, active and involved, until the ripe age of 90. To this day, though, if I think of a child’s need for love and affection, it is Anush and Minush who spring to mind, forever alive in my inner eternity.
________________________
5. First Love
We are lying on a bed, side by side. We don’t even touch. Simply to be thus, so close, without talking, without moving, without thinking, gives me a warm feeling of well-being without the slightest hint of illicit aspirations.
I am perhaps 12 years old. She is the same age, or near enough. I can still see her, a bit dumpy, straight auburn hair framing her face, splotched complexion, dressed with a long-sleeved blouse and a skirt reaching to mid-calf, of a brownish color. It was the era when the rule was for children to take a siesta after lunch, at least during vacations. And thus automatically, without even thinking about it, as if it was our right, we dutifully obey … together, of course, as we were all day together ever since she arrived in the boarding-house my mother organized every summer in order to be able to take us out of Paris for the long vacations.
I don’t remember her name. That’s not surprising, you would say, since it was almost three quarter of a century ago! But when that episode would occasionally come back to me throughout the years, not a single time could I remember it … which tends to show that her identity didn’t matter much, even though she was everything for me in that eternal slice of time, that was nevertheless oh so short. She thus remains without a name, without characteristics, with nothing surrounding her. SHE in capital letters, as the 19th century romantics would have baptized her. A SHE in a pure state, since she was a SHE that I had interiorised, representing all my aspirations, all that I was missing, all that I needed in order to complete myself.
We are thus lying on that bed, side by side, the door of the room wide open, this July afternoon, in the country house close to the Yonne river that my mother had rented for her summer boa
rding-house. Victor happens by in the corridor, sees us lying there, steps into the room. He is a grown-up, in my eyes he is a man, although he must have been no more than eighteen. He comes closer, looks at us, and says: “Don’t do anything stupid”. He lingers a bit. We don’t move. After a few moments he goes away. I remain lying out there, not moving, in total incomprehension: “Anything stupid? What can he mean?” And I forget him immediately. I feel so good just like that, alongside her. Time slows down, the siesta lasts, and lasts …
It must be a few days later. We are in the woods, she and I, not too far from the house, sitting on a rock, holding each-other tightly, face against face, body against body. My left arm is around her, my right hand is nestled on her naked thigh against her buttock, a place oh so warm, so delicious. I can still see her coarse white cotton panties, but how comes I see them, since we are embracing so closely, cheek to cheek?
We do not kiss. I do not think we ever kissed, not on the mouth, not even on the cheek or anywhere else. As for me, and perhaps she also, I feel nothing of what I later would learn to be sexual desire. Really nothing, nothing at all, no physiological, nor even mental manifestation.
We remain thus, in each other’s arms, without thinking, without moving. Once again time does not exist. I vaguely realize that daylight is fading, that night is getting closer, but just like that, in an abstract fashion that does not apply to me, to us. It is the height of summer, daylight lasts until 10 p.m. We have missed dinner, they must wonder where we have disappeared. After all we are only 12 years old!
But that thought would come to me only much later. At the moment I just am, we just are. And since we are we need nothing, we have no desire, no wish to change position, move, explore by touch any part of the other’s body. We are, in the twilight.
And then Victor appears, softly walking on the path cushioned with pine needles. He stops in front of us – we don’t move --, and simply says: “Oh! Here you are! Well, time to go home.”
We unglue ourselves, we separate. With Victor we come back to the house, one or two kilometers away. No one says anything, nobody scolds us, reproaches us for anything, even though for two hours everybody was searching for us, fearing a drowning in the nearby Yonne river or another accident. Simply they separate us without fuss, I in my room, she in hers.
The following day she had disappeared. I imagine her parents took her away. I never saw her again. The most surprising, when revisiting this episode, is that I never missed her, that I never regretted her, at least consciously.
But I keep for ever the memory of our short magnetic embraces, and above all I can still feel that hand on her naked thigh, not moving, not seeking, just resting there, in total bliss …
_________________________________
6. Adrift
The perspective was disconcerting. So was the situation. There I was, slowly drifting above the rooftops of the Serrano neighborhood, each street I was crossing opening like a yawning canyon under me as my vision senses came abreast of the protruding balcony lines, vertically plunging into the chasm.
It was hard to realize that these figures below were persons, cars, dogs, busses, all going about their business without a thought for the strange sight I must have been, should anyone chance to glance aloft, purposefully swimming above the roofs of Madrid, in full daylight, under the relentless sun of midsummer madness.
I had no fear, no apprehension, contrary to what happened in most of my dreams of flying. I felt no anguish that the magic sustaining me would somehow cease to function and precipitate me onto the hard concrete way down below, there to smash my bones so the marrow of my soul would splash out of my mangled head while I was watching, horrified. In fact, I did not even feel there was anything particularly magickal about my drifting thus, in a definite though unknown direction, above the whites of this sun dazzled city.
There was no feeling of dream, of unreality, not even of strangeness. Everything happened exactly as if I were actually floating there, in a body somehow rendered lighter than air and infinitely controllable. For instance, I could no more see around a corner than I could in real life. I had no more inkling as to what the next minute might bring about than one normally has in the everyday world, ruled as it is by tremendous odds against happenstance.
I had no sort of premonition whatsoever, no impression of telekinesis, of levitation. No ESP. It was "I", the everyday "I", who was drifting above the rooftops, and the only unusual thing about it was the fact of drifting thus and the perspective, everything and everybody foreshortened down below, the trees seen from top of their spreading foliage, new vistas swimming into my field of vision in the same way as if I were just strolling along, instead of lazily floating, effortlessly.
As yet another canyon opened below me, my motion forward stopped. In that sudden lull, my inner kinetic sense took hold. It told me that should anyone have chanced to see me from above, I would have appeared as a grossly bloated, fuzzy edged body and head, spread-eagled belly down, arms and legs ending in vague blobs, a silvery streak sneaking away towards the other side of the city, for all the world like an umbilical cord. I was also aware that this "I" who was about to watch what was going to happen down below did not bear much outward resemblance to the person I appeared to be in my ordinary self, that person that others could see, even if it was the same "I" that I had been using for most of my 25 years of life.
A movement below attracted my attention. A limousine had drawn up to the curb; a few persons were coming out of that posh building of the Calle Serrano which I recognized with a slight sense of shock. There was the Princess Dowager, hard to make out from this angle, hidden as she was under one of those flowered hats that seemed then to be the fashion for ladies of quality. There, was the Colonel Prince, easily recognizable by his shining pate, bald as the eagle whose profile he resembled, and whose piercing blue eyes chanced to look in my direction (how come he does not see me?). There appeared, in a hurry, the Princess, holding on his leash the fat Chow Chow she had smuggled in from America by drugging him and locking him in a suitcase, so that he slept for the whole length of the 18-hour Clipper journey.
They all climbed into the car, the Colonel-Prince at the wheel, and, as they sped away, the force that held me motionless blinked out ... and there I was on my couch, in my darkened room, wide awake, only now realizing the strangeness of the trite experience I had just lived, and which was exactly of the same kind and the same reality as if I had taken a stroll in the Retiro, nothing noteworthy happening during that time.
These were the years of hunger and fun, of drink and poverty, of music and of the occult. A wild energy led to unceasing activity, until late at night in the tascas of Madrid. Everywhere, people bought me drinks. Everywhere, no-one offered any food. Empty, empty stomach! Red, red wine galore! There was, I well remember, a whole month in which I ate a real meal no more than perhaps 10 times! A spoonful of olive oil with sugar mixed in was a delectable nectar, and sustained me many a day! And then, there was Yoga.
A morning meditation, followed by breathing exercises for one hour or so took the place of coffee and cigarette. An afternoon meditation and exercises replaced the sacred Spanish siesta. And a late-at-night session would be conducive to a deep, restful sleep, paradoxically alive with events upon which I could exert a degree of control, and from which I would wake up after just a few hours completely refreshed.
During those times, I experimented an extraordinary clarity of mind and sensual awareness. It is not only that whatever powers are mine were being extended to the utmost, without any feeling of strain, as indeed it can be in ordinary life, but that at the same time I clearly observed as if from the outside those powers in action. A sort of duality-in-one which allowed me to reasonably decide to stretch my awareness in decidedly unreasonable directions. Sitting in my darkened room I would decide, for instance, to let my mind roam the city and find my friend Theimuraz wherever he might be. He was, usually, in one of the many tascas in town, drinking l
iters of red wine, getting more and more sloshed. Then he would wander away, drop by a friend's house, perhaps, or go to another tasca, or a cafe ... The point is that when I saw him next, I was able to tell him with precision where he had been, and in some detail whom he had seen and what he had done, to his amazement.
This was also the time when I could go to a mysterious library, while ostensibly asleep, drawn there to a certain volume, which I would proceed to read, turning the pages, and remembering what I read, exactly as in normalcy, even after I had finished reading. Alas, when coming back from these exciting nocturnal studies, what remained for me was that they had been exciting and interesting, that I had indeed learned something of great import, but that this learning had sunk into the molecular level, so intimately woven into all parts of my being that it had become inaccessible to my reasoning self.
Theimuraz was also keenly interested in the occult, and together we roamed second-hand bookstores and libraries, in search of nourishment. One book we found revealed a hitherto unsuspected aspect of esoterica. The author, in great detail and in some 800 pages, explained how the skin could be a source of para-psychological phenomenon, without the help of any mental techniques. If I remember well, he advocated hitting lightly but repeatedly certain areas of the skin, in order to obtain distinct results, depending only on the area chosen. Many an hour we spent, Theimuraz and I, hitting each other with small mallets, as per instruction: we experimented with wood; iron; brass; silver; bone; any materials we could think of. We hit feet, ankle, hand, head, nose, elbow, buttock ... We were sure something in the technique eluded us, and persevered, and persevered without any result whatsoever, except the for the occasional blister!
A great source of books on those subjects was Irakli Bagration's private library. At that time Irakli was perhaps 45 years old, and had settled in Madrid where he had married one of the infantas, dona Mercedes de Castilla y Borbon. Irakli claimed he was the legitimate king of Georgia in exile, and indeed he was a scion of the famous Bagratide dynasty, perhaps the oldest documented in the world, as its genealogical tree dates two thousand years. On the strength of that tile, he had courted and won the hand of Dona Mercedes, a very nice woman who was also somewhat deformed with one game foot, an incipient hunchback, and other congenital defects common to the Borbon branch. Indeed one brother of hers was hemophiliac, like several of the family, another was almost deaf and had a harelip.
Irakli had been married before to an Italian who, I believe, had died, and of whom he had a son, who is now pretender to the throne of Georgia. When he settled in Spain and married Dona Mercedes, Irakli, according to Spanish law of that time, had control of his wife's fortune. If I remember correctly, that was not so much the principal, which was protected, but the income, which was considerable. Yet he was very good to us students. In fact, he is the one who arranged for Theimuraz and me to be granted scholarships at Madrid University, which is how we happened to be both in Madrid in that year 1951, after not having seen each other since 1944 in Paris.
Yes, Irakli had been keenly interested in the occult, and had been able to accumulate a considerable library on the subject, in several languages. Personally, before going to Spain, I had read several books on Hinduism. Comes to mind Rene Guenon's Introduction to Hinduism, Sri Ramakrishna's Life, books by Sri Aurobindo and others. I also had experimented various paranormal phenomenon, of which one stands out in my memory because of its recurring nature.
At that time I earned some money by playing the piano for dance classes. That was a low-paying, low status occupation that however suited me when I needed some pocket money and did not want to commit myself for any length of time. One of those classes was from 8 to 10 in the morning, 5 days a week. That was for me awfully early, since I usually didn't go to bed until one or two in the morning. I was not quite awake when I arrived to the Studio Constant, near Place Pigalle in Paris. But by then I knew the class sequence so well that I didn't have to involve my conscious mind at all, playing, stopping, continuing, interrupting, starting again on automatic pilot. And meantime I was watching, fascinated, the Battles of Alexander the Great.
No one ever had the vantage point I had. I could see the armies converging, as if I were in an airplane. I could close up on such and such soldier, or group of soldiers, and follow them into clashes with the enemy. I could backtrack and focus on a particular corner of the action, which I had just glimpsed previously, if I thought I had missed something important. Alexander’s attire had no secret for me, nor his tryst with that Persian boy, a story which Mary Renault would later recount. I was with him when he crossed the Euphrates, when he accepted the submission of the Indian princes, and, alas, I was with him when he died, oh so young, leaving his name for ever engraved in succeeding generations: Iskander, Zoltan, Chandor, Iskra, Lexo, Sasha, Sandro, Alexis, everywhere his name has remained, changed to fit the Babel of populations!
Day after day, every morning from 8 to 10 I was with him, watching the grain of the wood on the upright old piano organize itself into warriors, horses, concubines, chariots, desert and oasis, and continue the heroic Tale of Alexander the Great. My friends kept asking me: "Why are you forcing yourself to get up so early, to go earn such a meager pittance? Can't you do better for money?"
Little did they know. Of course, I could do better, of course, I didn't have to sleep so little. But Alexander was beckoning. I well knew that the delicate balance by which he was conjured back every morning could easily be shattered by any upset of my routine. How eagerly I would drag myself out of bed, walk 20 minutes to the subway, ride for a half hour, and sit myself on that piano bench!
Soon I also experienced that hypnagogic state just before falling asleep. There, however, all images were extremely small yet extremely sharp, as if seen through inverted binoculars. I could, up to a point, choose my image, but not by an act of will, which would have had as a consequence of exerting that effort my pulling away from the semi-sleepy state, requisite for hypnagogy. No, rather what I did was somehow orient myself in a certain direction, slyly, from behind, as it were, nudging myself until the image I carefully did not seek on the conscious level would appear, fast solidifying into a perfectly formed person or scene, endowed with free will, moving and evolving of its own accord, nevertheless in the way I really wanted it to go. And from there into sleep, where once again I could occasionally influence my dreams, or even, if I chanced to wake up, go back to sleep in order to finish an interrupted sequence.
I do not recall how or when Alexander the Great slid away from me, never to return. It must have been a change in the balance of living, a combination of another, strong interest with perhaps an end to these particular dance classes. Yet to this day I retain within me the vivid memory of his exploits, in Technicolor no less, engraved for always on that old piano which must have long since vanished into splinters, but whose tinny sounds remain embodied in the flesh of many an aging ballerina.
My interest for things occult and for the paranormal had been with me a long time. But it is in Spain, in the early fifties, that I extended my readings: Hindu doctrines and techniques, occidental explorations such as Tarot, Phrenology, Latran, Rosicrucian, Gurdjief, Russian mystics, hypnotism, multiple personalities, idiot-savants, and, as mentioned above, the weird "hit-the-skin" how-to treatise and other so-called practical manuals. Of Zen, the I Ching, Tai Chi, Macrobiotics, we had never heard. The word "judo" had not reached us, only "Jiu-jitsu." Karate, Kung-fu, Martial Arts were in the future.
Science- fiction, another fascinating realm, was hard to come-by in Franco's Spain, and what we could obtain dealt practically only with what the name implies: fictional science, worthy continuator of Jules Verne, Paul d'Ivoi, H.G.Wells, and other precursors. Few were the Western books dealing with the paranormal, at least in our reach. There was An Experiment with Time, which cost me many a sleepless night, so eager was I to record my dreams on paper that I could not fall asleep. And in fiction, I fondly recall Jack London's The Far-Traveller,
which I had read in French under the title Le Vagabond des Etoiles. What a revelation! It was enough to make one wish, like Jack London's hero, to be thrown in prison, in solitary, immobilized in a straight jacket, repeatedly beaten and drenched in icy water by sadistic guards, with no food and no drink for days at a time! Since the rewards were so immense!
It was with this background in books and experience, that I found myself, in Madrid, in the condition I described earlier, with little to eat for weeks and months at a time, with no money even for coffee, with just a few cigarettes. Instead of resenting it and doing something about it, on the contrary I plunged into yoga the same way I had plunged into the Travails of Alexander years before, careful not to change my routine of deprivation in order not to disturb those wonderful happenings of which I was both master and subject. Daily travels through Space, nightly flights through Light, purposeful wanderings in lunar skies, fiery azures over land or starlit waters, but not too far, as if away from human life emanations the umbilical cord might snap, leaving me stranded there by myself, with no port, or at best yanked back brutally, bruised and bewildered, yet little by little expanding my horizons, farther roaming high every time, until I could dare thinking of joining Her, unaware.
Yes, the Waters were the danger. Ominous, when flown over, balmy when plunged into the Mediterranean blues, the body anointed with olive oil spiced with lemon, a ripe tomato rubbed on the skin continuing inside mouth and body the sun of midsummer. But there at night, reclining in this dingy Madrid apartment on the Calle de la Vida, drunks staggering under my windows bellowing valencianas or jotas, there at night, liberated from bodily constraints, I would reach the edge of the eternal Waters, venture forth a spell and, overcome with dire forebodings of terrors to come, pull back. Yet everyday, little by little, further I would dare to push towards Her, oh so far, oh so present…
And then, one day, as if waking up from a long dream, I realized my nocturnal expeditions had ceased to be, that I had not, would not reach Her, of whose absence I had but a faint recollection, like a fugitive caress from a forgotten sun. My life took another turn, I went to Paris, then moved to New York. Here, one evening many years later, a vivid remembrance of those times invaded my meditations, so vivid, so present, that without any conscious effort on my part these magickal experiences of yore came alive again through that other magic, the written word. ___
_____________________
7. Anyone There?
He first realized his peculiar gift at the occasion of the great student manifestation of November 11, armistice day 1940, under the German occupation in Paris. He was then a student at the Lycée Louis le Grand where he was supposedly preparing for the baccalaureate examinations — since the academic routine continued as well as it could under these beginnings of the German occupation. And thus he quite naturally joined this spontaneous manifestation that no official thought to forbid, since how can you forbid something that was neither foreseen nor organized?
Like thousands of young people he went to the Champs-Elysées Avenue, where, in haphazard columns, this first challenge to the occupiers was taking place. Traffic, already very scarce due to the war conditions, was practically stopped, and, as the afternoon advanced, one could see more and more police on the fringes, together with more and more German military police: Dark green helmet, feldgrau uniform, boots, dark green tunic, heavy metal tag hanging over the chest by a chain around the neck, gun in the holster, blackjack in hand. They looked compact, heavy, sinister, powerful, threatening, but for the moment they held themselves apart, in groups, at street corners.
Yet another group of demonstrators came by. These youngsters were equipped with fishing rods, in French “gaule”, two each, and rhythmically they shouted:
“LONG LIVE … “followed by the gesture of lifting high their two rods, deux gaules = DE GAULLE! And all the onlookers would laugh, clap hands, and join in yelling rhythmically:
LONG LIVE …. , but careful not to say the proscribed name symbolized by the fishing rods.
That’s when a stampede starts from up the Champs-Elysés. People are shouting: “The krauts!! THE KRAUTS!!” The manifestation unravels, all flee down the avenue, running as fast as they could, boys and girls of the demonstration, gentlemen and ladies spectators, pursued by dozens of feldgraus blackjack in hand, heavy and massive, hurling themselves like human tanks onto the scattering crowd.
By who knows what instinct, instead of panicking like everybody else, he remains rooted in the middle of the pavement, the columns of runaways dividing around him. The feldgraus run after them, they get closer, two of them seem to rush straight at him. He does not move, they separate and pass him one on the left, the other on the right, and continue their chase, ignoring him totally!
A few meters lower they catch up with a group of students, beat them , throw them on the ground, clasp them in handcuffs with the help, one must say it, with the help of French police. That’s when calmly, without hurrying, without any quick gesture that could attract attention, he slides over to the deserted sidewalk, then to the buildings alongside, turn into a side street: Saved! His wildly beating heart slowly subsides, comes back to normal … And he reflects: “To be invisible, that’s not shabby!”
Some time later, another incident of the same kind : the subway is stopped at a station, policemen at every door. At that late hour the train is not too crowded. There are three cops at each door, to make sure that no one escape their control. One of them holds himself a little behind, an anonymous shape in civilian clothes, sporting an armband, while the two others, in uniform, examine the identity cards that the passengers hold in hand.
He is one of the passengers. Since he is rather tall, he easily towers over any ordinary group. He seems ever taller in this subway car, since right next to him are three small ladies, and an old man, none of them reaching to his chin. Like everybody else, he had his I.D. in hand.
The cops get in the car. Their eyes are everywhere, searching to make sure they are missing no one. They check everybody’s papers. They are one step from him, look once more at the papers of the three ladies and the old man. He sees their eyes look at the passengers, skim across his chest .. and they are past, checking the papers of the persons behind, nobody verifying his own! Once again, he is invisible.
These were the good instances . Other times, too many to recount, this invisibility could be rather annoying. In fact, annoying as hell. So often it happened that from behind the counter or the window where he was patiently awaiting his turn, the clerk seemed to look right through him to address the person behind him, as he was not even there! And this even though he is rather tall, sturdy, good-looking, and even though he was directly in front of the employee. It never failed to infuriate him: “Excuse me, here I am, right in front of you. You don’t se me, or what?” And the clerk, it he or she was polite, would say: “Excuse me, sir, I didn’t notice you!”
This also happened when walking in the street, where he wondered why some people walking toward him seemed not to see him and would aim straight at him, as if he did not exist. But how could he become invisible in such a way, despite himself?
A Hunting Trip to Daghestan and other stories Page 1
