OTHER SIT-IN groups spread themselves out beside the unfortunate mothers. They are independence groups who are demanding self-determination for their nation, who want the right to decide their own fate for themselves. Thus, for example, one hundred thousand Abkhazians want to separate from Georgia and form their own state. It is small wonder. Abkhazia is one of the most beautiful corners of the world, a second Riviera, a second Monaco. Well, the Abkhazians hit upon the same idea that twenty years earlier occurred to the inhabitants of that superb and eternally sunny island in the Caribbean called Antigua. The island was a British colony. In the 1970s, the inhabitants of Antigua formed a national liberation party, declared independence, and leased the island to the Hilton Hotel chain. London had to dispatch an armed expedition (four hundred policemen) in order to dissolve the party and annul the contract. So too here, in the Caucasus: the liberated Abkhazians could very well sign an agreement with some Western hotel company and finally begin to live the good life!
But will Georgia give up Abkhazia, it being such a tasty morsel? There are four million Georgians and only one hundred thousand Abkhazians. It is easy to predict the chances.
THE BUSINESS of Abkhazia (and of its ambitions for independence) best explains why matters have suddenly come to a boil in the Caucasus (and not only here), why the Caucasus is in flames. Two things have come together to create a volatile, explosive mixture. For the first time the concept of competing interests has surfaced, and for the first time the market offers easy access to arms.
In a country such as the former USSR, there existed only one interest — the interest of a totalitarian state. Everything else was ruthlessly subordinated to it; all other interests were combated and expunged in the most radical fashion. And now the state — the monopoly — suddenly and irrevocably falls. Immediately, hundreds, thousands, of various interests, large and small, private, collective, national, rear their heads, identify themselves, define themselves, and emphatically demand the rights long denied them. In a democratic state there is of course also a multitude of various interests, but the contradictions and conflicts between them are resolved or softened by experienced, well-tried public institutions. Whereas here there are no such institutions (and there won’t be any anytime soon!). So how are the natural frictions between competing interests to be resolved, since one can no longer do this through the old method of deportation and the whip.
And thus, in the place of the still-nonexistent institutions of arbitration, the simplest path emerges, the path of force. Such a resolution is abetted by the fact that weapons of all sorts have appeared on the black market, including armored trucks and tanks, owing to the disintegration of the old superpower and the loosening of discipline in the army. And so everybody and anybody is arming himself and sharpening his sword. It is easier in this country to get a pistol and a grenade than a shirt or a cap. That is why so many armies and divisions roam the roads, why it is difficult to determine who is who, what he is after, what he is fighting for. The formula of the pretender to power is being revived, typical in times of chaos and confusion. All manner of commanders, leaders, restorers, saviors, appear and disappear.
The best proof of this is to visit one of these countries repeatedly over a few months. Each time you go you will see new faces, hear new names. And what happened to those earlier ones? Who knows. Perhaps they are in hiding? Perhaps they have set up a private company? Perhaps they are announcing that they will be back at any moment? It is no coincidence that the amusement-park train ride on which one rushes up and then down at breakneck speed is called Russian Mountain. The little cars shoot along at such a pace that it is impossible to catch a glimpse of any passenger’s face, all of them fly by, disappear. This is what it is like in local politics. They elect someone, then immediately eject him. It isn’t long before the ejected one returns to drive out the one who took his place. In photographs, the guards of the one who has returned raise their pistols in a gesture of triumph. During this time the new exile escapes under cover of night with his guards.
“The investigator of Turkish and Mongol history in this part of the world,” writes the eminent British historian Sir Olaf Caroe (Soviet Empire, 1967) about, among other places, the Caucasus, “is like a man standing on an upper floor, watching the unpredictable and disordered movement of a crowd gathered on some great occasion. Groups meet and coalesce, groups melt and dissolve; a sudden interest draws a mass in one direction, only to split up again; a bidder or leader may for some moments gather a knot of adherents; political or personal causes lead to rioting; a regiment goes past and there is slaughter and destruction, or even for a time a sense of purpose and direction of effort.”
THE CAPITAL of Abkhazia — Sukhumi, a city of palm trees and bougainvillea. I was there in 1967. A note from that time:
In Sukhumi Guram took me for fried fish to the restaurant called Dioskuria. It is an enchanting place. The restaurant is built on rocks plunging into the Black Sea. And the rocks against which it leans are the ruins of its namesake, a Greek colony — Dioskuria — which existed here twenty-five centuries ago. Sitting at a table, one can observe parts of the city, sunken to the bottom of the sea, transformed now into a kind of monstrous aquarium, along whose streets parade groups of fat, lazy fish.
It would be interesting to know whether Dioskuria still stands at the bottom of the sea or whether, surviving there for 2,500 years, it was finally swept away by the Georgian-Abkhasian rockets.
WITH MY HOST Giya Sartania (he is a young writer and translator), I drive out of town to make a pilgrimage to the Church of St. Nina in Santavro. Christianity is a very ancient religion in Georgia, already rooted here in the fourth century, and this little church was built at just around that time. Sometime afterward, we are in a church in Dzvaria, erected two hundred years later. And despite the difference of two centuries, the churches resemble each other, are the work of the same imagination and sensibility, which, it is evident, did not change over the centuries.
To enter these churches today is to go back in time one thousand years. Meaning this: The churches were until now either closed or transformed into museums of atheism or warehouses for fuel or wheat. And before that they had been thoroughly robbed, stripped to their severe, bare walls. In such a state they are now being handed back to the faithful. And everything is as if we had returned to the age of the catacombs. Here, amid the empty, bare walls, the first Christians gather.
Meantime it grew completely dark, and since the moon had not yet risen, it would have been difficult for them to find the way if not for the fact that, as Hilo had predicted, the Christians themselves were indicating it. Indeed, to the right, to the left, and in the front one could see dark figures, making their way cautiously toward the sandy narrow combes. Some of these people were carrying lanterns, although covering them as much as was possible with their cloaks, others, knowing the way better, walked in the dark.
This is from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis. But with Giya I now witness a similar mysterious scene. For in this empty, freezing-cold church in Dzvaria a single object is brought in from the outside — a small metal cross standing on a bare stone altar. In front of the altar bows the priest, a hood on his head. There is silence; one hears only the sound of water trickling down the walls. And the slow footsteps of several women entering with candles. The glow of the candles illuminates the twilit church. One of the women pulls a wheat flat cake out of her bag and shares it with everyone present. There is something moving in this interior overflowing with humidity and darkness, in this silent scene with the wheat bread, in this strange behavior of the priest, who neither turns around nor looks at us.