Song On The Wind Chapter 1

Song on the Wind A Life in the Caucasus

I

The ghosts drove old Mikhail to our door again. He stood in the shadows at the edge of the night, blinking sheepishly into the yellow light of the oil lamp my grandmother held. My brother and I stood behind the folds of her black dress and peered out at the graying stubble on his lean cheeks, the old suit jacket worn over a heavy shepherd’s sweater, as he turned and regarded the night. “There’s a mist coming off the stream,” he said, gesturing towards the great trees looming in the dark and letting his arm fall again. My grandmother left the lamp on the table for us before going out. As we had many times before, my brother and I watched from the window as they walked away, the big, ambling Mikhail and my wiry grandmother who, in her dark clothes, disappeared immediately into the night as if something had swallowed her. We sat on the old stools by the stove, listening to the low rush of air through the stovepipe and the crackle of flames as we waited for our grandmother to accompany Mikhail past the

ancient walnut trees and the old stone watchtower to the stream where the ghosts were. During the plague years, centuries before, a family had lived beside the stream in a house that by the time of my childhood was just a ruin of crumbling stone walls surrounded by wild pear trees. They had come to our isolated mountain village from elsewhere, but had been there for decades by the time the plague reached our valley and people began dying indiscriminately. Meager shepherd’s huts and fine houses alike were deserted but for corpses and swarms of black flies, while feral dogs roamed the villages amid the cries of unmilked cows and sheep starving in their pens. The family beside the steam was miraculously spared, but the nearby villagers of those superstitious times held them somehow responsible for the devastation. One night, a procession carrying torches came to their house, dragged the family outside and stoned all of them to death on the sloped meadow beside the stream. Amid the hideous scene, an obdurate grandmother cursed her killers, swearing that the family would forever torment them and their descendants. So the story is told in our village. It was believed that my grandmother, having come from farther up the valley, was immune to the curse, though she rarely gave such stories a second thought anyway. Every few weeks, Mikhail, a kindly shepherd who lived at the other side of the stream, would find himself on our side past sundown and

invariably came to our house for his escort through the spirit world. He claimed to have seen the ghosts many times there, and even to have been touched on the back of the neck by one, which caused him unforgettable terror, though he had never encountered them with my grandmother at his side. On the unlucky occasions my grandmother was not in, he would resignedly make his way down the steep footpath to the valley, go around the narrow ravine and climb back up to his house in the dark, an hour out of his way. A few minutes after my grandmother had disappeared into the night, we heard the dog barking at the gate and my grandmother hushing him, lifting my heart at her return. “Stupid Mikhail,” she said good-naturedly. “Those ghosts should chase him all the way home,” and we laughed with her. My brother rattled the walnuts under the stove with his stick, and my grandmother went to the kitchen to continue her cooking, and discreetly pour a small glass of the pear brandy that she made every autumn.

If you have seen it even once, you would never forget the way first light in summer falls across the village of my youth, set like a jewel on the high slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. In the remote silence of the towering mountaintops and steep green sides of our valley, time held a different meaning than in the rest of the world. Around us were abandoned stone watchtowers that swallows darted in and out of, mysterious chapels hidden among the forest shadows where wolves roamed, and stone ruins scattered in the meadows. Everything seemed to stand still while day and night revolved slowly around them, and centuries passed without leaving a trace. At that altitude, the sky was dark sapphire, and the only movements to be seen were

the white clouds slowly teasing apart and eagles floating along the grey shoulders of the peaks like great blackened angels. My great grandparents, grandparents, parents and I walked the same forest paths, played beside the same stream, scythed the same fields and ate from the same garden plot, all of it unchanged for longer than anyone could remember. Those who had come before us were all buried beside a little white chapel across the valley, in a row reaching so far back in time that the oldest grave markers had become weathered and effaced, and were indistinguishable from the other stones left by nature on the grassy slope. Like old Mikhail, we lived with the whisperings of a past that was almost discernible, surrounding us like the phantoms of mist that drifted down through the village from the mountainside in the evenings. My brother and I had been left to the care of our grandmother, my parents being so occupied by the difficulties of life at that time in our capital that this arrangement, not uncommon in our land, was considered to be healthier for us. She had been widowed when my father was four years old, and she raised him and his two sisters on her own in a life of unending hardship. Originally from a small town farther up the valley, her ancestors had been cultured and prominent landowners who lost everything when the Communists took over, leaving my grandmother no patrimony but her impeccable manners and an unfailing esteem for the value of education.

As the early light brightened the sky, the mountains stood in jagged silhouette above us in the cool air. The valley slowly threw off the night’s chill, leaving the grass and leaves of the orchards silver with dew, and by the time the sun rose above the ridge, people in the village had already been long at their chores. The scent of wood smoke from cooking fires trailed faintly through the air as my aunt Lali drove her four pigs out to forage fruit and nuts fallen in the orchard. Bau, a kindly and vivacious old widow whose cottage stood above ours on the hill, milked each of the six cows that were like children to her, stroking their flanks and muttering endless endearments and rebukes to them as she did. My second cousins, Zura and Gela, hale as two bulls, began the hard trek up the mountainside into the forests to cut wood, carrying rope and tools over their shoulders. And my father’s cousin Shota crossed the stream to his garden to pick cucumbers and drink from one of the bottles of homemade alcohol, called araki, that he hid there. The little cottages of our hillside village were clustered along a rocky track, the foot of each cottage almost level with the roofline of the one across the lane from it. Some were hundreds of years old, with roofs made of timbers topped with clay-like soil. Half were abandoned to various stages of decay; one was empty, without windows or doors, another had a collapsed roof and the oldest were just stone walls fallen among the meadow grass.

A short walk down the lane, my father’s cousins, Irakli and Shota, had divided their father’s land, their cottages facing one another across a rocky yard where piglets and chickens roamed beside an herb garden fenced with dried branches. They were the sons of my grandfather’s brother Gia, a pitiless and severe man who had been one of the most fearsome people in the valley. He never went anywhere without riding horseback, stern and proud on his wiry black mare. His piercing dark eyes seemed to glint with anger wherever his gaze fell, and though he was gruffly kind to us, his brother’s grandchildren, we always feared him. At one time Gia’s niece, my aunt Eka, after years of disappointment, finally succeeded in having her first child. When the little girl sickened and died after only eleven months of life, everyone in the village mourned. I remember Bau going up to old Gia with tears in her eyes to tell him the news. Still seated on the back of his horse, he looked off across the valley. “Some are born and some die, “ he said. “What do I care.” He lightly kicked the horse’s dark flank and clattered away, receding like an ominous shadow across the green mountainside. He died not long after that, of liver failure. Gia’s youngest son Shota was lean but not tall like his brother and father. He had watery blue eyes, a troll’s large, sharp nose, and a baritone voice that resonated in his chest like the grunt of a boar. His face was coppercolored from the strong mountain sunlight, and he invariably wore dark

trousers with a shirt whose pattern had faded with age to an almost uniform gray, though it was always clean. Shota was an intelligent man, his temperament a mix of melancholy and humor, yet his existence seemed to swing from misfortune to comedy and back again, in a manner closer to a picaresque drama than real life. He had a cynical wit, and was as ready to recount his own failings as another’s, without prejudice. His misadventures were many and legendary, and his culinary skills were sought after throughout the region for religious festivals, sacrifices and weddings. He had the habit, no matter the company, of peppering his conversation with a quantity and inventiveness of cursing that was unheard of in our conservative region. While we had come to accept this habit as part of his nature, strangers who encountered Shota thought him either belligerent or a lunatic, until they couldn’t help laughing at his comments and stories, and ceased being offended. Half of Shota’s life was given over to periods of the most strenuous labor, when he would work tirelessly and productively for weeks, dragging fallen trees from the forest, mowing and collecting hay, turning the soil of their large family plot by hand in a determined industry, as if working against some deadline known only to him. Then, as suddenly and unpredictably as if he had been struck by lightning, he would drop his scythe, put down his axe, or wave his hand in dismay at the piglet he was trying to catch for neutering, and go in search of drink. After finding some old jar of

araki in his cellar, or cadging a flask of spirits from a neighbor, he would begin one of the episodes of drinking that periodically devastated everything he had ever accomplished. During these times, Shota would wander like a specter in search of his next drink, with an almost uncanny instinct for finding it. His wife, Bela, often noted with dismay: “If anyone in the valley opens a bottle, Shota will smell it.” Some inner voice seemed to inform him when the farmer down the hill would be opening a liter of beer. He would stop by to visit a neighbor on some matter just before relatives arrived with baskets of food and a twenty-liter storage bottle filled with wine. One summer day, he noticed two solitary figures, barely visible under a shade tree at the other side of the valley, and made the long walk across with a few tomatoes and cucumbers in the pocket of his jacket. Passing the spot a couple of hours later on an errand for my grandmother, I saw Shota waving to me, seated in the shade between two acquaintances he was amusing with one of his stories. There were glasses and a large jug of araki on a log before them. Somehow, he had known. At times the yelling of his wife, in her frustration over his affliction and the family’s acute need, could be heard coming muffled from their cottage. Seated on the milking stools outside my grandmother’s door in the evening, my brother and I would watch Shota walk forlornly along the lane in the half-light. Passing the old stone tower silhouetted in the gloaming, he would enter the gloom beneath the trees and cross the stream, disappearing

into the mist rising in the evening shadows. With a piece of cheese and a bit of bread in his pockets, he would walk to his field, where he cached a bottle or two of araki, and he would drink, eat tomatoes from the vines, and finally fall asleep beneath the white stars that filled the silent sky. In an optimistic time, Shota once kept a little inn, called a dukani, beside the road in the valley below. He worked for weeks on the shell of the building beside the rushing river, installing homemade window frames, repairing the tin roof, putting in a floor of rough planks. It was a lovely little structure, with a window on either side of the front door and a stone grill by the semi-circular drive in front shaded by an oak tree. Inside the dukani were tables with chairs, a simple kitchen and a counter where Shota worked, filled with his hopes. Since the time I was very young, I often climbed alone to the steep meadows above the village and sat gazing for long periods across the jagged ridges of the Caucasus ranged into the distance. Out of their midst rose the immense dome of Mount Kazbek, where the ancient Greeks believed Prometheus to have been bound, shining white in the sunlight against the blue void. The green valley spread before me in eternal stillness but for the languid spirals of dark vultures floating above. It would always cheer me to see the little patched roof of the dukani far below, with a column of grey smoke rising from the grill and slowly dispersing in the motionless air.

People began to visit there, travelers crossing the mountains, smalltime merchants making their way to Russia in battered cars overloaded with citrus or melons from the south, men getting far from the regional capital for an afternoon with their young mistresses. The dukani began to enjoy some prosperity, most of which was dispersed. Of a magnanimous nature, Shota never accepted money from friends for his hospitality, and he had many. At times I would stop there while walking to the hamlet to buy some small item for my grandmother, or coming from the river where children gathered to swim. Shota always offered me a plate of food or a glass of the pear soda made by a farmer down the valley, and we would sit together on the bench by the door while he smoked, the river rushing noisily behind us. He was happy there, and spoke of the future with optimistic curses. “One day I might even tie a little bear cub to this tree out front, to attract customers, “ he said wistfully. Faint lines showed sharply across the coppery skin of his face when he turned to the afternoon light, exhaling a thin line of smoke. “It would be perfect then,” he growled.

Eventually, the familiar shadow again fell across Shota’s life. When I would gaze into the valley from my perch on the mountainside, I could see the fire in the grill was frequently unlit, and only occasionally would a car pull into the little drive, only to leave again. Shota had taken to sleeping in the dismal back room, unwilling to face his wife’s fury. On an errand one morning, I walked the long path down to the valley and stopped at the dukani. The air was cool with the river rushing past, glittering in the sunlight. “Uncle Shota?” I said timidly, pushing against the half-open door. It was dim inside, and the numerous little bottles of vodka, each holding a cupful of the clear liquid, that had lined a shelf along one wall, had disappeared. In the small storage alcove at the back, Shota sat with two men at a table littered with greasy plates, bits of onion and potato and two nearempty liters of araki. “Daughter,” he called affectionately from the shadows when he saw me, coming to plant a kiss on my forehead. “Sit down and I’ll make you a beautiful plate,” he said enthusiastically, but I declined pleasantly and soon left him with his taciturn companions. One evening, an old and ailing cow belonging to a nearby farmer sought a hiding place to die, as animals often do. It lumbered up the slope behind the dukani, slipped underneath the rear of the building and wedged itself as far back as it could against the floor joists in the darkness, where it

expired. It was not long before the sweet, overwhelming odor of decomposition filled the dukani. Shota had to hire a scrawny horse and four men to drag the immense swollen carcass out and carry it away on a cart pulled by the nag, bucking and protesting the stench. The farmer, shrewdly hoping to profit from his worthless cow, declared that Shota was responsible for trapping his cow beneath the dukani, and demanded compensation. Seeking support for his specious claim, he told anyone who would listen of his misfortune. “My Sunflower, my Sunflower,” he lamented, repeating the cow’s name as if it had been some prized pet. Such troubles are monumental to a man with nothing, and Shota, who was in fact very sensitive, suffered deeply. He brooded for days, withdrawn and rarely seen, alone with his bottles. But then, as was his habit, when he could endure no more, he simply gave up and dismissed the entire affair. The farmer, believing he had swayed community opinion in his favor, approached Shota about the matter in public. Armed with his notorious cursing, Shota humorously recounted how he had hired the men and horse, at his own expense, to remove the beloved, maggot-filled carcass. He concluded by telling the farmer that he wanted compensation for the fact that the lingering smell of Sunflower still nearly caused anyone who entered the dukani to faint. “If you want your Sunflower so badly, go dig her up and take her home to bed with you,” Shota said dismissively. By the general laughter that

followed, the farmer understood that no profit would come of ever mentioning Sunflower again. Shota eventually gave up all hope of maintaining his business, and closed the dukani. Occasionally, he would take refuge there on a chilly night, and then the dim, ghostly yellow light of a single candle could be seen in the little windows beneath the immense black mountains and star-flooded sky. The stone grill collapsed, the oak tree leaned mournfully and the paint faded and peeled from the little building that stood, empty and decaying, beside the rushing blue river. At that lovely spot, you could see the steep-sided peaks high against the sky in the sunlight, and our beautiful valley spread out before you, scattered with the ruins of so many dreams.

In late summer, the sun burned through the long afternoons and the nights began to feel the edge of autumn’s chill. Dusky plums hung heavily from their branches among the ruins, innumerable varieties of apples and pears ripened in trees throughout the village, and windy nights left showers of walnuts on the grass of the meadow outside our gate. My grandmother worked tirelessly through the season, trying to gather and store enough food to keep us through the long mountain winter. Many foods were grown only to be preserved, while others were eaten in season. Bitter yellow plums no lager than cherries on a certain tree were

boiled with herbs for hours to make a delicious tart sauce called tkemale that we ate throughout the year. Small, round panta pears were hard and inedible from the tree, but were prized for making compote by boiling them in jars and sealing the fruit and syrupy liquid together. Walnuts that fell from the high branches of the ancient trees were gathered daily and laid under the stove to dry, their pulverized meat used in pastes and sauces. Winter pears were the last fruit of the season. Picked in late October, when the leaves had already fallen from the trees and snow dusted the mountaintops, the pale green fruit, hard and glossy as river stones, shone in the autumn sunlight. They were kept in the cool darkness of the cellar for nearly half a year. Then, before any spring fruit were yet available, they could be eaten over a period of weeks, and seemed the most delicious thing we had ever tasted, their soft flesh as full and rich as honey.

Before sunrise, men from the village made their way as quietly as phantoms through the shadows among the trees, and climbed to the steep meadows to mow the grass for hay. Each carried a scythe over his shoulder, the great curved blades swinging behind them like trailing crescent moons. When the sun rose over the ridge, I could look up from my grandmother’s garden to see my uncles and cousins scattered across the mountainside, each in the meadow held by their family for centuries. To one side, the orphaned boys from the next village, barely big enough to swing a scythe, struggled together to gather the enormous amount of hay needed to keep even one cow alive through the winter months. Occasionally, the clack-clack of a scythe blade being sharpened against a stone came through the trees. At times I would climb up to visit my uncle Giorgi as he worked. Married to my father’s sister Eka, he was taciturn and lean as a wolf, and we enjoyed each other’s company because most of the time neither of us spoke. He would pace slowly across the meadow, turning back and forth with the rhythm of the scythe as the grass, dried by the late summer sun, fell before him with a whisper. Wildflowers, clover and seedlings were caught up with the grass, and mingled into soft piles with the delicate stiffness of fine starched lace. As I gazed across the bluish peaks rising in the distance, I could hear only the sound of my breathing, and the slow swish of the scythe, the ancient symbol of time’s passing, and our own mortality.

At the other side of my grandmother’s garden lived my aunt Lali and Uncle Irakli, Shota’s brother. Although Lali struggled to feed several children of her own, she occasionally brought large round flat breads filled with beet greens and cheese to my brother and me, knowing it was our favorite food. Even at a young age, we were aware of the magnitude of her gifts. To make them, Lali fired her stove with wood from the trees Irakli felled in the forest, stripped of their branches and dragged down the mountainside with a hawser looped across his chest. These he sawed into lengths, split with an axe and stacked to season. The beets were grown in their garden plot, where they broke the thick soil with a mattock each spring and irrigated with water channeled from the stream through sluices that had to be dug every year. Lali made the cheese herself once a month from the milk of their cow, shaping and pressing it by hand into white bricks. The flour and salt came from the family’s ration, carried home on someone’s back from the hamlet that lay a long walk up the valley. And Lali would spend hours making a dozen of the flat, round loaves, washing and chopping the beet greens, mixing ingredients, rolling out the dough on their rickety table, keeping the stove at the proper temperature as the wood burned and she baked them one at a time. My brother and I, seated on the stools outside my grandmother’s door, saw Lali emerge from beneath the leaves of a pear tree carrying a clothcovered plank, making her way through my grandmother’s garden between

rows of bean poles and cabbage buds. As she climbed the steps into our yard, the afternoon light shone on the hills behind her. We ran to the table with almost tearful joy, cutting into the flat steaming loaves, to taste the mellow white cheese mingled with the delicious mineral flavor of the greens and a hint of rich homemade butter on the thin crust. Lali, a quiet and kind woman, smiled and tousled our hair as we ate and, in our elation, we appreciated how such a gift had come to us.

Though I loved my grandmother unreservedly, I constantly longed for my parents, particularly my mother. Often in the afternoons, I would sit for hours on the slope above the village overlooking the valley, wishing for her to return to me. The only telephone in the entire region was in the small post office of the hamlet, so we never knew when my mother or father would visit. Seated on the meadow grass, I gazed down along the winding grey ribbon of the road beside the river. I fixed my attention on the distant point where the road disappeared around a bend, waiting to catch sight of the old red and white minibus that passed by each afternoon, and every week or two brought my mother from the city. On Friday, when she usually tried to make the long trip to see us, I was at my perch from early afternoon, irritated then by the everyday surroundings of cottages, pigs, valley and mountains that formed the prison

of my heart. As soon as I caught sight of the minibus approaching with its cloud of dust, I jumped into the lane and raced down the steep path, my small legs flying clumsily over loose stones and clods of manure. As the minibus neared, I paused, breathing fast, to watch whether it stopped—meaning that my mother had come. But it continued slowly on its way up the long grade, towards the pass over the mountains. Having contained my loneliness for an entire week, I turned and trudged back up the hill, my eyes swimming with tears. I hid in a corner of the orchard, weeping inconsolably while the sun slowly disappeared, its last radiance highlighting the jagged mountaintops and piled pink clouds as dark swallows darted silently through the pale air above me.

Pre-publication release  Joseph Weed all rights reserved 2008 – for information please contact [email protected]