The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (14 page)

“You didn’t leave that here, did you?”

Iremashvili holds up the novel as an answer to his friend. “I thought they’d search us in chapel.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” says Soso. “You think lazy old Black Spot would pass up an excuse to avoid Litany?”

“I know I’m an idiot,” agrees Iremashvili. “A very lucky one.”

Soso returns to his own wooden locker, where the contents lie scattered around his bed. Abashidze has been disrupting the private items of every student, regardless of his grades or his loyalty to the priests. As the seminary’s latest Inspector, promoted from the deputy position, Abashidze has promised Serafim that he will keep a tighter rein on a student body that has become violently rebellious, and has even in recent years produced some of Georgia’s most infamous young revolutionaries. The Inspector has rifled through Soso’s notebooks, his copy of Xenophon, and his Ilovaiski textbook of Russian history—written with an infuriating, pro-imperialist slant—in search of forbidden texts. Soso’s tall black boots have been tossed on the floor, de-laced, their gaping tongues obscenely pulled out over their toes.

“Cocksucker,” Soso mutters, although he can’t help but grin at the affront. He removes the poem he’s been writing from the pages of Darwin’s book and holds it high in the
air for the other students to see. “Hey, Black Spot!” he calls. “Looking for this?”

The seminarians glance up from their own trashed bunks, regarding his small act of bravery with either mild amusement or indifference. Soso recklessly tosses both the book and the poem onto his bed, in full sight, as a kind of taunt to the Inspector.

He sits on his mattress and shoves the protruding tongues back into his boots. He finds the laces and begins to string them through their holes, chanting in a singsong rhythm:

“Not for all the trees in Eden would I these rugged cliffs exchange
,
Nor for paradise undreamed of would I my native land exchange!”

Peter Kapanadze, another of Soso’s friends from his hometown of Gori, laughs and slaps his thigh. “Eristavi!” he cries.

“Of course,” answers Soso with a grin.

Kapanadze plops down on the bed and joins in the recitation of the famous poem, written by a Georgian count who is admired for his rebellious stance against the Russians and his calls for reform. The two boys chant and sway together with their eyes closed, moved by the verse. Kapanadze, who is also sixteen, but with a trim and muscular body more like a young adult’s, wraps his arm around Soso’s shoulders and pulls him side to side with the rhythm. Soso looks tiny next to Kapanadze, more like his younger brother than his peer and classmate. Soso tightens his stiff back, charged with the pride of having started a political movement, albeit one of only two people. He opens his eyes and scans the dorm for other recruits while waving his free arm, as if he were
spurring a future Georgian national orchestra into playing their patriotic anthem with all the passion it deserves.

“Shut up, Soso,” growls Parkadze from his distant bunk. “You pockmarked, one-armed loper.”

“Your voice sounds like my farts,” adds another seminarian, “when I’m doubled over with diarrhea.”

“Fuck you,” barks Soso. He pops up from his bunk and points his finger at them. “I chant better than all of you idiots combined and you know it. You’re not worth one piece of my shit.” As quickly as they have appeared, the popping veins in Soso’s forehead recede. He inhales and calms in the span of a single breath. “I wish I had my old slingshot,” he says, his tone now more of a jest than a taunt. “A stone in the face is what you’ll get when you cross a couple of mountain men like Peter and me. We’re true Gori
abreks
, that’s what we are!”

Soso sits again, squinting with mirth, and refocuses his attention on his boots. He’s oblivious to the smirks of his companions. They know all too well the difference between these boys from Gori and those legendary Caucasian mountain men called
abreks
, resisters of all authority, who are more likely to be Chechens or rugged Islamists than Georgian teenagers at a seminary in Tiflis. Still, most of the seminarians secretly wish they were as brave as Soso and Kapanadze, reciting Eristavi’s poem so openly.

Iremashvili, having put on his trousers and his long cotton tunic, stands by Soso’s bed passing his forbidden novel from hand to hand as if it were too hot to hold. He decides to tuck it into his pants, pulling his tunic over it. “Want me to help you clean up?” he asks.

Soso, concentrating on his laces, grunts—an animal code that Iremashvili has learned to interpret as approval. Iremashvili gets to work, folding Soso’s clothing, straightening his books, and tucking each item back into his friend’s locker. He finishes his tasks before Soso is done lacing his boots.

Although Soso’s twenty-year-old black boots have distressed toes, the soles have been replaced and the stitching is fully intact. Every time Soso weaves the laces, he extends his arm until the length of each side is balanced and measured against the other. Then he pulls and adjusts them with the same precision that the priests use to prepare the diskos and the chalice, a comparison that doesn’t escape Iremashvili’s observation.

“Your father’s?” asks Iremashvili, nodding at the boots.

Soso glares at him with dull and mute anger in his eyes.

Iremashvili lowers his head and fumbles his too-large hands around each other. He rubs his toes against the dormitory’s uneven wooden floor, wishing he hadn’t asked such a stupid question. Many times, as a young boy, Iremashvili watched those boots pound against Soso’s thin chest and stomp down on his arms, crunching the child’s bones. Many mornings when he came by the Djugashvilis’ rented room to fetch his friend, he found those filthy boots sprawled by the door, speckled with blood. His gaze would then drift to Soso’s father Beso, who, having temporarily returned to the family he tortured and then abandoned, was invariably passed out in the room’s only bed, stinking of sweat and cheap wine and kerosene spilled from an upturned lamp.

Soso registers his friend’s embarrassment and lets it pass without comment. He shimmies out of his surplice and cassock, relying on his right hand to do most of the work. “Go on!” he barks at Iremashvili, shielding his warped left arm from his friend’s sight, although the damage is hardly a secret after so many years in school together. “I’ll meet you at the door,” he says.

Soso finds a cotton shirt, thin pants, and a pair of socks. Iremashvili backs up and faces another seminarian, who’s busy making his bed with the awful precision demanded by the priests, until Soso, fully dressed and sitting on his bed, grunts at him to turn around again. Soso is pulling on his boots and tucking his pants inside them.

“What’re you going to do with your book?” Iremashvili asks, indicating the Darwin text on Soso’s bed.

“Leave it in my locker.”

Iremashvili offers the wide-mouthed astonishment that’s clearly expected as his reply. “Soso, are you crazy?”

“What did you call me?” asks Soso, his brow furrowed in anger but his lips rising in a grin.

Iremashvili holds up his hand in apology. “Forgive me,” he says. “Koba.”

“Don’t forget my name.”

“But your book,” says Iremashvili, eager to change the subject.

“Let them search my locker,” says Soso. “I’m not afraid of them.”

He picks up his poem, folds it into a square, and tucks the paper deep into the pocket of his pants. He throws the
book into his open locker and kicks the top closed, the wood slamming down with a loud crash, startling the few seminarians still lingering in the dormitory. “Christ,” one of them mutters. Soso nods at Iremashvili and together they proceed to the stairs.

“What’s that you’ve got this week?” asks Iremashvili once they’re in the hall.

“Darwin’s
Descent of Man
.”

“I hear it’s very good.”

“It’s clarified a few things,” says Soso, grinning. “Now I understand why you look so much like a monkey.” He laughs, claps his hand on the top of Iremashvili’s shoulder, and gives it a hard squeeze. Iremashvili thinks his friend is going to throw him to the floor or smash his face into the flimsy wall of the hallway—the beginning of a fierce but playful battle, full of cheap shots to the head and sharp kicks to the ribs, exactly the way they used to fight back in their unmonitored days in the dusty streets of Gori. Iremashvili chuckles at Soso’s joke. He wants to retort with a minor quip about the simian hair on Soso’s ass but thinks better of it, especially with that hand gripping his shoulder. He presses his lips together and says nothing.

In the refectory, there’s a giant steaming samovar, a platter of thinly sliced
lavashi
bread spread with honey, and a small bowl of
lobio
beans for each student. Soso lines up, fills his glass, takes away his bread and beans. All six hundred seminarians are crammed into this small, overheated room. They’ve fallen into a regular seating pattern, so the
meal moves swiftly. As usual, Peter Kapanadze and Vano Ketskhoveli are sitting at the end of the long table. They glance up and offer Soso and Iremashvili nods as they approach. Vano, who is stockier and less handsome than his friends, with glasses, a rounder face, and a more prominent brow, is eating his meal one bean at a time in a desperate attempt at making it last. Kapanadze, having just finished his lunch, sighs in frustration, reclines, and pulls on his thick beard. Soso and Iremashvili wolf down their bread in seconds, and most of their beans. The smoky flavour and almost meaty texture of the beans is more taunting than satisfying. The seminary’s small rations are intended to teach some stupid lesson about self-discipline or gluttony; none of the students care to remember. A couple of eavesdropping priests march back and forth on the far side of the room like bored prison guards.

“Hey,” whispers Vano, “you going to Chichinadze’s this afternoon?”

“No,” answers Kapanadze. “I thought I’d stay around here today and kiss the Inspector’s fat lips.”

Iremashvili and Soso laugh over their few remaining beans.

“What do you think?” Kapanadze scoffs, leaning forward and flicking a crumb across the table. “Of course I’m going.”

“What’s the reading today for Devdariani’s group?” asks Vano, his plump fingers tapping the table.

“Why
his
group?” grumbles Soso. “It doesn’t belong to him.”

“Well, he started it.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” says Soso. “Your brother started it long before Devdariani was here.”

“We’re reading’s Plekhanov’s latest,” says Kapanadze. “What, you didn’t read it?”

“I never got a chance.”

“No way you’ll find it in Chichinadze’s.”

“Damn it,” says Vano.

“What’s the point of even coming?” mocks Kapanadze. “Better to stick your head in the toilet.”

Iremashvili guffaws and slaps the wood. Soso gulps his tea and decides that since he can’t have a second helping of bread or beans, he’ll go to the samovar and replenish his cup. Standing before the serving table, he takes care to smile at the suspicious priest on duty, who’s guarding the remaining slices of bread from would-be gluttons. Soso whispers under his breath: “Hope you choke on your louse-infected beard, you brigand.” When he returns, his friends are midway through a conversation about their assignment for the socialist reading group.

“Plekhanov’s a genius,” Iremashvili claims, crossing his arms, leaning back, and playing the authority. “I can’t wait to discuss him.”

“You should read Marx,” says Soso as he sits with his tea. “Plekhanov is only saying exactly what Marx said twenty years before him, except he writes
Russia
instead of
Germany
, so we’re supposed to love him more.”

“I
have
read Marx,” says Iremashvili, stung.

“You won’t learn anything new today,” adds Soso, sipping his bitter tea. “Not with Devdariani leading the way.”

“I thought you two were friends,” says Kapanadze.

“Friends,” scoffs Soso. “He’s an asshole and an idiot.”

A commotion arises on the other side of the refectory as Inspector Abashidze lumbers into the room, flanked by two burly priests, and approaches a third-year seminarian who is eating with his friends. The authorities stand sternly before the boy as he holds tight to his bread, his skin paling. Wheezing, Abashidze pushes his glasses up his nose and portentously raises a beat-up copy of a Balzac novel for the entire refectory to see, as if the seminarians should all gasp in horror at the sight.

“What’s this?” asks Inspector Abashidze.

“Oh,” says the boy meekly.

“Why did I find it in your locker this morning?”

“It isn’t mine,” says the blinking seminarian.

“Orthodox priests do not read French filth.”

“I don’t know where it came from. I don’t have anything to do with it.”

“Then you’re as honest as a Jew.” Abashidze, as if playing a Roman emperor, gestures with his chin to unleash the two large priests. They clutch the boy’s wrists and pull him up from his seat, knocking his bread on the floor, honey side down.

“Wait,” says the boy.

The priests yank the terrified student out of the refectory while Abashidze presses his fat hands together to emphasize the piety of his duty. He follows his minions into the hall and then down into the cellar, where the boy will spend the next twelve to twenty-four hours in a tiny room constructed
for solitary confinement. No light, one glass of water, and nothing to eat. Only a blanket on the floor and a bucket in which to relieve himself. It’s a punishment the seminarians have affectionately labelled “the wolf’s ticket.” Although there’s a certain honour to the sentence—it’s seen as a kind of training for their future lives as revolutionary socialists—these seminarians are still just boys who secretly dread the fate. The remaining students murmur and gossip in the refectory.

“Silence while eating!” shouts the priest Alexandre from his march along the back wall. He punctuates his command with a sharp clap.

“Poor guy,” whispers Iremashvili. “The wolf’s ticket for reading Balzac.”

“They’re monsters,” murmurs Vano.

“He deserves it,” says Soso. “The stupidity of stashing a novel in your locker. What did he think would happen?”