A burned-out house behind a fence painted by Saakashvili before the war
The road to Tkviavi is dark and wet. It’s a gloomy early spring day, and it is raining. The road is well paved and smooth until we turn off and head out to the villages along the way, and then it quickly becomes muddy and rutted. Some of the fences, maybe every third one, are painted the bright yellow of a caution sign. Our driver, Misha, says “this is Misha’s color,” meaning it’s the color of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s party. The fences were painted before the war, part of Saakashvili’s program to win the votes of rural Georgians by paving roads, painting fences, and doing other infrastructure improvement. On the gates to the houses, there are stickers announcing that UNHCR, CARE, USAID or MercyCorps has been there. Every third or fourth house is a burnt-out shell, a husk coated in soot with a missing roof and crumbling walls, now sodden with the winter rain and the spring downpours. On one brick wall in the village of Karaleti, there is a glass box enclosing photographs and printed text. We stop to look at it, hoping that it’s some information for the IDPs about what is going on. Information is in short supply here, and nobody knows when aid is coming, or more importantly, when it is stopping. But it’s a description of a small bridge-building and river reconstruction project; something that seems small and pitiful in comparison to the destruction al around us. We take some photos and drive onward in near silence, interspersed with Dan’s nervous chatter.
Burned out house in Tkviavi
When we cross the bridge over the Patara Liakhvi river, we begin to be afraid. We have no idea where the South Ossetian border is, actually, but we know we’re within a few kilometers of it in the roughly controlled ex-buffer zone. Things are still in turmoil here, with reports of random shootings and looters coming out at night. But it seems calm, almost dead right now: other than a few knots of village men smoking and talking in the rain, there’s almost nobody outdoors. We’re in an unmarked car, a tiny blue Niva with Georgian plates, and nobody seems to be paying us any attention. We turned back at Tkviavi, too afraid to go on.
There are people here, bundled old women and more knots of men standing and smoking, but the gloom and the rain cast an eerie pall over our journey. At the village of Marana, we stop and take photos of a large house whose walls are crumbling and whose roof is now nothing but a twisted metal frame; a spooky lacework of destruction. In the courtyard, CARE has built a one-room cottage, blandly stuccoed in the color of old paper, for the family to live in. It is tiny in comparison with the wreck of the old house looming over it. Dried grapes, raisins still hanging in bunches, dangle from the vines. Nobody was able to harvest them during the occuption this fall, no wine was made, no pleasant dinners in the courtyard took place.
A woman stopped to talk to us. “You should see the village that was bombed,” she says, and points down a muddy track. The houses we’ve seen so far were looted and then burned by the South Ossetian irregulars, but apparently the houses actually bombed by the Russians were far more thoroughly destroyed. We bump down the road, splashing through the thick sloppy mud as we go. In the center of the village, we see it. It’s a rubble of stones and charred beams and bricks thrown helter-skelter in piles. It’s roofless, completely uninhabitable, a pile of stones where interior walls used to be. There is a white stove half buried in the rubble inside, its door ripped off. Around a corner, there’s a sodden couch, just the top half of it, and a battered wrought ireon bedstead lying crookedly in a pile of stones.
An old woman approached us, her head covered in a complicated tangle of knit hat and scarves. Her face was gray and lined, with a dusting of whiskers on her chin and a single gold-capped tooth hanging loosely in her mouth. She told us that five bombs fell on this village, Marani. The destroyed house we’re standing in front of belonged to her relatives, four women named Kareli: Daribani, Svena, and two other names I did not catch. The woman we’re talking to is Noriko Kareli. She’s stooped, and wears small rubber boots, more like shoe covers, but with no shoes inside. They’re spattered with mud. Behind her, a gray-haired woman with her hair pinned up is dressed all in black. She wears sodden house slippers and is filling a bucket from an outdoor tap. There’s no running water in this village, apparently, and people have to haul water from the central tap to their homes.
Noriko tells us that on the night of August 11, bombs came raining down from the sky. In the house across the muddy road, a bomb landed and killed the man who lived inside. The house is still standing, its roof blown off. The four women who lived in the house we’re standing in front of escaped alive, and they’re in a cottage in Tsmindatsqali. Dan found out that the reason the village was bombed was that it was a Georgian forward position and military forces were there.
Dan says that when Noriko was talking, and when the first woman we talked to was speaking, it seemed as if the war was ten or twelve years ago. It’s the same as in the settlements—people speak in emotionless voices, without melodrama, simply reciting the facts as they were. I wonder why this numbness is so pervasive. Is it a cultural style, a reaction to such horrible events, fatigue with telling and retelling? An emotional defense mechanism? Somehow the very flatness of this recounting seems like something to be investigated rather than to be accepted at face value. Its very tonelessness speaks to a kind of militarization of everyday life that I don’t fully understand.
I love how curious he is about science and history. He’s such a smart, engaged kid.
