Eight Pieces of Empire (13 page)

Also aboard the plane was Aleksandr Ivanishvili, the thirty-three-year-old brother of my friend and colleague Nino Ivanishvili. A violinist and physicist who had never held a gun in his hands and regarded the war in Abkhazia a mistake, Aleksandr and seven of his friends—one an artist, another a doctor—headed for the front only after hearing Shevardnadze’s desperate radio exhortations that Georgia was at war with Russia.

Aleksandr’s body was never found amid the wreckage of the burning jet, but unknown charlatans hounded his sister Nino for more than a year
after the war ended, saying Aleksandr was alive and extracting money from her for supposedly arranging for his release. After the con men had their cash, their promises gradually ceased, and Aleksandr was of course never heard from again.

The Georgians coming back from the front were getting pulverized. Thomas Goltz, the war reporter, and I watched one carload pull up to a hospital. One of the soldiers was dead—coated in blood. Part of his head had been blown off. His three comrades were sobbing and slapping him in the face, as if trying to wake him.

A few minutes later, the Abkhaz rained shells onto the capital again, and smoke rose in velvet plumes into the sunny September air. They managed a direct hit on the TV tower, which had beamed Shevardnadze’s exhortations from atop a hill. A few hours later, I saw huge flames coming from the shore near the sanatorium. The howitzer battery had been hit. I thought about what had become of the two soot-faced men who had been manning it.

Finally, the phone lines with the outside world were cut. I felt a sense of despair mingled with relief. There were no satellite phones, no way left to report. We were alone with the fate of the city.

Freed from the demands of conversing with my editors, the next day Goltz and I decided to take a bar of soap into the Black Sea and bathe our filthy bodies. It was an otherwise perfect late-summer day, and I thought about the incongruity of a serene swim along the shore of a condemned city under constant bombardment.

Suddenly, two Georgian air force Sukhoi-25 fighter bombers appeared on the horizon. They streaked low and passed almost exactly ninety degrees above our heads. We dunked ourselves underwater, as if that would be any defense use had their bomb doors swung open and dropped one.

As we reemerged for air, I saw the two planes race toward the Abkhaz positions. There was an earth-shattering blast. Then just one plane returned our way and headed back across the sea. I knew that the entire Georgian air force had consisted of four aging Sukhoi-25 fighter bombers. Now there were three.

After our bath was cut short, I returned to the sanatorium and called the military press center. Although the phone links with the rest of the world had been cut, the phone lines within the city were still intermittently working. With the lack of people left behind to use them, they were working better than ever. It was one of those strange, snickering ironies that one finds amid total chaos: Bits of life still function normally, out of inertia.

A Georgian press officer whose voice I recognized picked up the receiver. I asked about the planes that had just streaked over the city with their unmistakable scream. “Whaaaat planes?” he slurred. He was stone drunk.

The wake for the city had begun.

WITHIN TWO MORE
days, the Abkhaz closed to within a few hundred meters of the main government building, the mini-Reichstag of this empire war. Inside, the food had run out. Shevardnadze convened a final press conference, but it was mostly a rant about the Russians and how they had deceived him. With no one to translate his comments into English, one of Shevardnadze’s assistants asked me to interpret for the few remaining journalists.

Ed Parker, in attendance out of a sense of history, even though he had no outlet to report to, leaned over. He told me about how he’d been to the airport and seen “a hundred bodies” of those killed when the last plane full of reinforcements had been shot down. “Mate, I’ve seen more bodies in one day here than in two years in Bosnia.” His eyes were full of sick excitement.

On the seventh floor of the local “Supreme Soviet” building, the members of the provisional Georgian government gathered. Those who wanted to flee had already availed themselves of the opportunity. Those staying behind had reconciled themselves to either capture or death. Georgians have a tradition known as
datireba
, a form of mournful singing performed at funerals. Relatives and loved ones literally cry to the deceased as a type of protest, scolding them for having left them to flail
about in the temporal world. They also have a tradition of bacchanalian toasting and drinking, a tradition designed not only to celebrate life’s more felicitous moments, but also to paper over the saddest of them. The mood among the government officials was a mixture of all of this.

One of the officials, a barrel-chested man, was also a well-known jazz musician. He invited me in, pounded on his desk, shouted and laughed boisterously, poured a glass of cognac, and belted out a loud song.

And then there was Aleksandr Berulava, now “vice commandant” of the city. He had given me a ride that first day in Sukhumi a year earlier. He was reviled by the Abkhaz, who accused him of tolerating abuses at the start of the “War Nobody Started.” Berulava resented journalists for not taking the Georgian side—as he saw it—in the war. He had been morose for days as the fate of the city hung in the balance.

Now, with the end near and only the details of his fate to be decided, he seemed relieved. In fact, he was beaming. He sensed closure. His choice to stay had been made. I tried to understand his fatalism.

Outside, the shelling was getting heavy again, and the sun was setting. I got ready to dash the half mile back to the sanatorium. As I left the building for the last time, Berulava ran after me onto the grounds with something in his hands. For a moment, I thought perhaps he wanted to harangue me. Instead, he clutched a book. It was a collection of essays by Shevardnadze, called
My Choice for Democracy and Freedom
, signed and dedicated personally to Berulava just two days before:

Dearest Aleksandr
,

for your support during the darkest days in Sukhumi
.

Yours truly
.

Eduard Shevardnadze
.

He pushed it into my hands. “Here. I want you to have this. If I get out alive, you’ll return it to me. If I don’t, please keep it.…”

It was the last time I would see Aleksandr Berulava. I still have his book.

Back at the sanatorium, the shells pummeled us all night and all of the
next day. By now there was no food. Even the battle-hardened Ed Parker was becoming more unhinged, as if that was possible. He, Thomas Goltz, and a marooned relief worker from the French aid group Médecins Sans Frontières argued over the ownership of a piece of processed cheese. Parker threatened to disembowel the aid worker. We restrained him, arguing that a Tolstoyan duel over a piece of processed cheese was not worth the trouble.

Parker and I walked through the grounds of the sanatorium. A big jeep belonging to the aid worker was parked nearby. The door was emblazoned with a huge emblem reading
MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES
. Parker’s eyes lit up. “Mate, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s steal that jeep, cut off the top, and rip out the seats. We’ll give it to a bunch of drugged-up Georgian fighters and have them bolt an antiaircraft gun to the floor. Then we’ll take pictures of them firing the thing into the air with the emblem
MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES
on the side. We’ll publish the photos all over the world. When the Abkhaz get here, they’ll hang that aid worker from a lamppost.”

That night, there was nothing to do but listen to the particularly fierce pounding of artillery. One shell landed in the doorway to our building, shattered the windows, and disfigured a tile mosaic in the yard featuring the face of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin. It was a dramatic night, but I had no way to report any of it. It seemed like time had stopped, existence suspended.

IT WAS TIME
to get out of the city.

Rumors flew.

There would be a plane out.

Or a boat. The information spread like wildfire. We waited for a lull in the fighting. When it came, our Ukrainian cameraman from Reuters, Sergiy Karazy, and another cameraman and photographer, the Azerbaijani Farkhad Kerimov, and I set out on foot for the airport, fifteen miles away. (Two years later, Farkhad was executed by a group of Chechen rebels who mistook him for a spy.) On the misleadingly peaceful-looking
road, there was not a single vehicle. We encountered a few pedestrians hauling sacks, a trickle of humanity headed out of the city. Near a train depot, an artillery shell landed about thirty yards from us. We hit the ground.

When we approached the airport, I saw a TU-134 passenger plane approaching. Slowly it circled and then landed. A mass of fighters and a few civilians rushed it, believing they’d found their ticket out. Faces turned somber when they realized that the craft was going nowhere; as it pulled to the terminal, jet fuel leaked like rain from the wings. From a jerry-rigged gunboat in the harbor, the Abkhaz had peppered the fuel tanks with bullets, puncturing them. Soldiers rushed to and fro with buckets, trying to collect the valuable liquid before it spilled onto the ground.

We wandered away from the bucket brigade and the airport. To where, we had no real idea. It was pointless to continue down the coastal road. The Abkhaz had cut it ten days before. There was no way out.

We walked into a village across from the airport road. Most of the houses were deserted. But in front of one, an old woman in a long black dress and head scarf was standing in the yard. A widow. Widows in rural Georgia usually dress in black, no matter how many years have passed after the death of their husbands. They are never invisible.

Strangely, the woman was smiling.

She invited us in. Her name was Eteri. There was a persimmon tree in the yard, and she went outside and plucked several of the bright orange globes and tucked them into her apron. The inside of the wooden farmhouse was a typical Georgian shrine to her dead husband. It exuded timeless warmth. There was only a repressed sense of worry on her face. She cooked up a meal of chicken and soup, the
supra
, or Georgian feast, trumping the bleakness of the situation. She fetched some home moonshine, made from tangerines. We drank it copiously, in between her toasts to Georgia, to God, and to her dead husband, who had passed away years previously.

I asked her if she planned to try to leave. “Of course not,” she said, nonchalantly. “The reinforcements will be here soon.” We tried to convince
her to reconsider. She smiled and refused. I did not have the heart to tell her it was all over. Eteri put a kerosene lamp in a window and poured more of her moonshine. I slept deeply, with the bittersweet taste of fermented tangerines on my lips.

In the morning, I peered out a window. The shore was visible. Large naval ships were emerging on the horizon. The Russian and Ukrainian navies had sent boats in to evacuate those who wanted to leave, and that meant just about everybody. I gathered my things and turned to say good-bye to Eteri. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with us?” I asked.

There was no answer, just a slight smile.

“I’ll be here,” she said. I did not know if this was naiveté or a bow to fate. After the war was over, I returned to the area and got close enough to see her house in the distance. The windows and door were flung open, and a breeze was blowing curtains back and forth. Predictably, the house had been looted. Eteri was gone.

A mass of locals moved toward the ships. Many were sobbing. They were coming to terms with the fact that they would never see their homes again. The Georgians were leaving, knowing the Abkhaz would make sure they did—or worse—if they arrived before they fled. They would not be allowed to return—collective punishment for the war.

The ships could not move close enough toward the shore; the water was too shallow. Women swam in their flowing dresses toward the waiting boats.

And then there were the dogs.

They moved in several packs around the area where the ships had pulled up. Labs, huskies, and German shepherds. Mutts and purebreds. Their owners had abandoned them. They yelped, they barked, they ran about excitedly.

We waded out to sea with the refugees. We were hoisted on board a boat full of them. We started to pull away. One of the dogs jumped into the water and paddled his way toward the boat. A woman screamed. The captain stopped the craft. We waited, and the dog was hoisted to safety.

Then we pulled away from the shore. Across the city of botanical
gardens, palms, and pastel-colored buildings, a great many fires now burned out of control. The yelping of the dogs faded to a collective whimper as we moved toward the horizon.

They—and we—were the lucky ones. Hundreds of people walked days through icy high-mountain passes, starving. Road bandits—of their own ethnicity—often stole their belongings as they tried to walk to safety. Dozens froze to death along the way.

WHEN WE REACHED
the shore on the other side at Poti, we piled onto a bus. We headed toward Tbilisi. In the seat in front of me sat an older man. A rotund man, balding, the type of man you expect to see singing loud Georgian songs and toasting with wine around one of their legendary feasting tables. The man was sobbing uncontrollably. The sound rippled through the bus like a throbbing knife. He kept repeating the same word,
“shvilo! shvilo!”
meaning “son” or “children” in Georgian. It can also be used as a simple exclamation. In this case, it sounded more like a moan. The man glanced at me, quieted, and then burnished an apple with his coat. He turned and handed it to me.

“Here,” he said. “You remind me of my son.” The son had heeded Shevardnadze’s call to come to the defense of the city, and he was killed in the war’s final days.