Tbilisi, Georgia, 2008-2009

The Summer War

By Elizabeth Kendall

Ekendall7@gmail.com

 Me (below) at Azeri Embassy, Tbilisi

 

 

I think I’m a traveler because I like mini-survival dramas – rituals of being lost, then somehow found.  You walk through unfamiliar streets and start marking "your" neighborhood.  You put the books on your guestroom night table, and feel settled.  I like repeat visits to strange places, too, when recognition rolls back the dark edges from a newly-lit landscape.  Nowadays, though, when violence could pop up anywhere, such lost-and-found games can turn ominous.  Last August 7th I made my fourth trip to Georgia, the beautiful little country in the Caucasus, to see friends and do research – and got stuck in a war.  It was like nothing I'd ever known, and it gave me new kinds of alertness, humility, and the sheer wonder that can probably come only from a wartime escape.

I first went to Georgia in spring of 1988, back when few Americans understood that it was its own place, not just one of the “states” of the Soviet Union.  The Dance Theater of Harlem took me, a journalist, on its Soviet tour.  After bleak and hungry Moscow, small Georgian ballet students met us at the airport with bouquets of grasses.  In the capital were mountains wherever we looked, and plane-tree-lined boulevards, ancient Byzantine churches, people with the faces of icons, fresh herbs, powdery bread, salty cheese, roast chicken, a goat grazing under my hotel balcony  – and crazy, ancient hospitality.  When the dancers and I sat down in a restaurant, champagne and ice cream streamed from neighboring tables.  When the family of New York City Ballet founder Balanchine received us in their bohemian apartment (Andrei Balanchivadze, still alive then, was Balanchine’s younger composer-brother) we got toasts, music, compliments, gifts.

It was probably that glimpse of a magical, fertile Georgia that sent me back in 2006, sixteen years later.  I’d begun a book about Balanchine.  His company, the New York City Ballet, had taught me that I could ask art to be beautiful.  I wanted to give something back to him, even if he’d died in ’83.  No-one knew much about Balanchine’s parents, Georgian composer father Meliton, Russian society mother Maria.  Nor had anyone described the father’s tireless campaigns, in Tsarist St. Petersburg, to inform a dismissive musical hoi polloi of Georgian music’s wild sophistication. 

Brother Andrei had died in 1992.  But the younger Balanchivadzes in Tbilisi  agreed via e-mail to see me, even though Georgia had suffered, in the meantime, in the breakup of the Soviet Union, terrible birth pangs:  civil war, corruption on high, years of no heat, light and hot water - then the “Rose Revolution” of 2003 (roses stuck in gun barrels) that brought the young US-educated lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili to power, but left key border disputes unresolved.  What I found in 2006, and again in 2007, was a country re-inventing itself.  The old castle above Tbilisi was dramatically spot-lit.  The winding streets of Old Town had sprouted cafes and craft shops.  Museums and libraries showcased Tbilisi’s pre-Soviet past, as graceful Caucasus city with opera house and casinos. 

And we sat down, the Balanchivadzes and I, in that same apartment, to reconstruct family history -  Balanchine’s niece, nephew, nephew’s wife, and their son, the men with that hawk-like profile one remembered from “Mr. B.”  Another Balanchine enthusiast emerged in Tbilisi to take me around - a smart philologist with mournful eyes, Manana Kvachadze.  Real new friends, just when I thought I was too old to make them.  I began to remake the past from clues in the present; to get the wild and dramatic language in my ear, the beautiful script in my eye, the question in my head that haunts every Georgiaphile:  how could the politics be so screwed up, when the culture (poetry painting music humor) is so rich?

The goal of last August’s trip was Banoja, a village by the ancient capital, Kutaisi, where Balanchine’s father had begun his journey from provincial priest’s son to bon vivant Petersburg composer.  I flew into Tbilisi from New York via Istanbul, on August 7^th; was driven up mountains to the summer compound of Manana’s family - two high verandaed houses with gardens – where I would stay instead of the little hotel next to the Balanchivadzes.  It was cooler there, and Manana’s car could handle the trip to Kutaisi better than the Balanchivadzes’ asthmatic one.

Little did we know that all hell was about to break loose.

 

                                                 ***

Georgia is bordered on the South by (clockwise east to west) Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, the Black Sea  - and on the north by Russia.  But it’s not really Russia up there, rather a bunch of little “republics”:  Daghestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, etc. etc. - and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, these last two on the Georgian side of the border.  Borders in the Caucasus, that mountainous land bridge between Europe and Asia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, are a little porous.  It’s more about tribes than countries, and tribes don’t “get” borders.  On the day I arrived, the Georgians living in South Ossetia attacked the South Ossetians living there – the former backed by the Georgian army, (and egged on by Saakashvili’s new best friend, the US), the latter backed by Putin’s Russia.  Or else it was vice versa. 

But it took us a while, on that idyllic mountain, to get the facts straight.  I can see the family in the open-air living room - Manana, her husband, daughter, brother, parents, uncle, aunt, cousins and a couple of neighbors, hunched around the TV, watching Saakashvili solemnly declaim from his desk.  I’m outside by a grape arbor.  Not understanding the Georgian spoken on TV, I’m trying to make use of the general paralysis to learn Georgian letters, from a children’s book about talking farm animals. 

This was crazy.  But everything was crazy in this big/little war.  For the next three days, Georgian and Russians armies fought fiercely over the South Ossetian capital, Tsinkhvali.  As the Georgians fell back, the Russians poured in, with tanks, and planes – and they came through Abkhazia too, the other disputed province to the west.  The trouble was, with Budapest, Prague, and Georgia’s own Russian invasions hovering in the collective memory, no-one knew where they would stop.  No-one knew what to do either, least of all me.  Should I stay or get out?  One minute I was refusing a ride to the airport (what, leave my friends?), the next, racing into town to get some dollars for my “escape.”  Then on August 10^th, came news of the Russians bombing even some military sites near us.  The ruthless survivor in me awoke. 

I called my Embassy, was told to get over there and register for evacuation to Armenia, one suitcase only.  But even in the grip of fear, I couldn’t reconcile myself to this industrial park of an Embassy (on the just renamed Balanchine Street), where I waited in a hysterical crowd for my documents.  I didn’t want to leave on a sanitized bus, and arrive, hotel-less, in Yerevan, from where you can’t get to Istanbul (Turks and Armenians don’t mix).  There had to be a better way.  Turkish Air hadn’t yet left Tbilisi.  I moved up my reservation.  Was there a train?  No tickets.  How patient were my Georgian friends, racing around town trying to get me out, when they could have been losing their country, their future.  On the mountain where we gathered each night, Manana’s young-professor daughter Tamrico was writing her own elegant war diary, sending it out piecemeal to a Russian internet journal (and all of it to me a week later).  In it she tells of eyeing me across the nighttime ping-pong table with “a terrible envy” - because I was getting out, to safety. 

By August 11^th, the airport had closed, bank machines were empty, the American bus had left, the Russians were advancing.  But a ticket had been found for me on the overnight train to Baku, Ajerbaijan.  It waited on the track, green and shabby, a uniformed woman standing Soviet-style by each car’s door.  On the platform, Kvachadzes and Balanchivadzes filled my arms with bananas, bottles of Borjomi water, loaves of bread, round shiny crackers (no diner on the train).  In my car’s other compartments:  a large Azeri family; a solemn Mongolian mother and daughter; a big guy in orange Puma shorts with two Puma-clad kids.  In my own compartment, a salesman, Georgi, kind and red-faced, mopping his brow in his undershirt.

The train started up; I waved a tearful goodbye.  But inside me, the survivor demon was exulting.

***

 

Beware of exultation in a time of war.  At the first border stop on the Georgia side, amid black-clad Azeris swarming to board the train, we got out for air.  I’d made friends, thanks to my years of improvised Russian, with salesman Georgi and the Puma shorts guy, also Georgi, a Georgian turned Hollander, who’d come to pick up his kids from their Georgian summer (his wife waited anxiously in Maastrich).  In the setting sun, we drank cokes by the tracks, our train car attendant fed stray dogs - and mentioned visas.   Though some ex-Soviet states, like Georgia, don’t require visas from Americans, the Azeris let no-one through without one.  Even in a war.  It seemed I had to get off and wait at the station all night for the train back - to Tbilisi and the bombs. 

But I wasn’t alone:  Puma-Georgi and kids were visa-less too.  What he did have was an Azeri business partner, whom he instantly phoned.  “We’ll go out through another border town,” he mouthed sideways to me.  “But first we’ll go back and get the visas.”  I understood nothing except the “we.”  Did he mean me too?  He did. 

I’d been adopted, a total stranger, into another Georgian family.  This guy was square-jawed with glasses, like Clark Kent, with a big sunny temperament - he’d been a water polo champion.  His kids wore denim and camouflage.  But he carried within him those ancient mountain laws that demand rescue of strangers and women.  And, unaccustomed as I was to being helpless on the road (me with my backpack, cargo pants, shirt tied around my waist, pens in reach), I threw in my lot with him.

As we raced full-tilt back to the besieged town, in a taxi we’d found outside the station (we’d tumbled off the train, with all the luggage, just as it was leaving), Georgiana, seven, and Luca, four, sat in the back with me.  They spoke no Russian, but I would point and they would say the Georgian words – сar - mankana; moon – mtvare. Soon Georgina showed me Luca’s head on her shoulder, then hers drooped onto mine.  I sat still.  It was a warm little head. I remembered the ancient Greek travelers’ proverb:  “Οπου γης κε πατρις. Wherever you are (is) fatherland.” I was home, right then, on the earth, the full moon traveling beside me.

The fear returned at 3 am, in Tbilisi, when my phone beeped as I slept in the other bed of Georgi’s sister Maggie.  The Russians were close, wrote Manana.   Maybe I should call my embassy.  I didn’t; I’d gambled on Georgi.  But what uncertain hours lay ahead on that long next day, as we raced around town to get ourselves photoed for the visa, waited in an anxious crowd at the old, bougainvillea-covered Azeri Embassy of Tbilisi, raced back to the border in a taxi, waited again - for hours - at the border checkpoints of Krasnii Most, Red Bridge.  I was doing my best to divert the children, count the suitcases, ask no questions, make no complaints – even if I’d fallen on the concrete stairs of Georgi’s apartment building that morning, gashed my arm and sprained my wrist.  

American women of my generation have a strange relation to war.  We were practically born into it, yet over time we’ve moved ever farther from the real thing.  In childhood I could sing the whole Marine Corps hymn, “From the halls of Montezuma..” that my father taught me; he’d flown a fighter plane in Okinawa.  I spent hours spiriting Anne Frank through foggy Amsterdam to a new hiding place.  Then came Vietnam, a napalm-riddled landscape on TV.  Though I went to college demonstrations, I barely knew any soldiers slogging through those delicate jungles.  Even less do I know anyone in the volunteer army fighting now in Iraq, in the ominously, eerily remote Bush war.

Yet here I was myself, in a desert landscape, at a border, in a crowd of supplicants fleeing war – as if I’d fallen through some geo-political crack, to find myself in a place privileged American women don’t ever see.  I’ll never forget that border – Krasnii Most, Red Bridge.  The unruly, desperate, crowd in black clothes, smelling of sweat, backed up behind thin wire gates next to border shacks.  Veiled women holding squalling babies, indifferent khaki-clad guards with their rifles, a muddy-green river winding through the arid red landscape, and out beyond the wire fence, the low bridge itself, of pinkish brick.  Our suitcases dragging in the dust.  Luca throwing stones through the green leaves of the riverbank.  And the smell of oil.  That smell actually came later, when we’d reached Baku, after nine hours on mountain roads.  That viscous smell, omnipresent in Baku, has seeped retroactively into the day’s memories.

We made it out in the late afternoon, against all odds, because of the bravura of my rescuer.  He’d put on, for our escape, a jaunty pink polo shirt and plaid pants.  And maybe because he’d gotten caught, as a teenager, in the Azerbaijan-Armenia war of 1996, he knew what to do:  when to mention the name of an exalted personage to the sweating Azeri Embassy officials; when to joke in the easy bantering Russian they all knew from Soviet childhoods; when to buy water and chocolate, what to tell his kids, how to wink at me to prop up my spirits, who to pay with what money, what to say to a guard.  I could only watch and marvel.  I looked, in my black cargo pants and thin white shirt, nothing like the other women in their black clothes and veils.  Yet I was as helpless as they.  I could feel their despair seeping into me, in that sweltering clump at the last checkpoint.  What would pick me out to be saved?  And just as my heart almost broke from the thought of my faraway New York friends, my writing students waiting for the new semester, Georgi roused himself again. “Children, foreign children!  Make way!” he shouted in Russian, pushing Georgina and Luka forward.  The crowd parted, the guards gave us a terse nod, and we were through. (below right, mountains above Baku, where we stopped for tea).

Later, in Istanbul, by the bright pool of the Hilton, I learned that a ceasefire was being brokered by French president Sarkozy, just then, as we waited in the heat at Red Bridge.  I could have stayed!  But the fighting didn’t stop with the ceasefire, and it still hasn’t stopped, in this war that Human Rights Watch called a disaster for civilians.  Many are still displaced.  Many have died in postwar border clashes.  The breakaway provinces, now recognized by Russia, are more broken-away than before, yet Georgia hasn’t ceded them.  

And life in Tbilisi feels eerie, according to my friends.  Like “feast in a time of famine,” they say, quoting the great Russian playwright Griboyedov.  It makes me sad.  War wastes the time of people who could be doing other things - writing, singing, rejoicing, feasting. 

And even if I’ve learned more than I ever need to know about escaping from war, I’m going back to Georgia this summer.  I still need to make it to Kutaisi, 19^th century cradle of Georgian identity, to figure out who exactly was Meliton Antonovich Balanchivadze, he of the neat beard and mischievous eyes, who fathered the composer, Andrei, and the choreographer, Georgi.  I need to know this, so I can get on with telling the tale of how one family made music and art its whole life.  How one son conquered his own country with music, while the other went to the West, and changed the face of dance, and art, forever.