The Searcher

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  • • •

  In a town called Telavi, which was set a little above the plain and had a jumbled, Alpine air, they stopped and bought provisions. How long would they be gone, Koba wanted to know, and when he found that Hammer wasn’t sure—two days, four—bought enough for a week, on the grounds that there was nothing to eat where they were going but milk and cheese. He had been once before, and yes, it was beautiful, but for him he preferred to look at the mountains than sit on top of them with a lot of crazy sheep people (or shepherds, as Hammer slowly realized he meant). Still, they needn’t suffer; they would eat well. As he got out of the car Koba held his hand out, looked up at the sky, and announced that the rain would stop in twenty minutes.

  The supermarket first, for rice, pasta, tea, beer, wine, crackers, biscuits, oil, butter, salt. Then to the covered market, where an old man sliced them huge cuts of lamb and old ladies sold heavy bags of the freshest tomatoes, aubergines, potatoes, parsley, apricots, cherries, the dirt still on some of it and bloom on the rest. Koba went about his business with the pointed confidence of a city dweller among hicks and Hammer, to compensate, supplied unlooked-for smiles and gamarjobats as he followed. When they came out, the rain had indeed stopped, and the sky had started to lighten from the south. Their last job was to fill up the Toyota and its reserve tank—when Hammer saw the plastic barrel in the trunk he felt sure that Ben had done the same, on his way here—and after that Koba declared that they were ready. Or would be, just as soon as they had had lunch.

  “Koba, we have enough food for a platoon. We need to go.”

  Turning down the corners of his mouth and shaking his head, Koba pointed north to the mountains, where black clouds still sat on the peaks.

  “We wait. Best thing we wait for tomorrow, dry road, but you cannot. OK. I drive good, it’s OK. Now have lunch, my friend’s hotel, very good, we can see, we watch the . . .” He gestured upward, not knowing the word.

  “Clouds,” said Hammer.

  “We watch the clouds. One hour, maybe two.”

  Hammer saw the resolve in his broad face and realized that arguing wouldn’t work.

  Two hours, in the end, which was enough for Koba to have his fill of trustworthy food. Hammer ate a little, said less, and tried to stop checking his phone by forcing his mind up into the mountains and keeping his eyes on the sky. When he was done he went outside, took his phone from his pocket, and dialed.

  “Ike?”

  The line was bad and the connection slow, but he could still hear a world of fear and hope in that one word.

  “Elsa. I’m so sorry. I should have called.”

  “Are you OK?”

  Extraordinary, that she could spare a thought for him.

  “I’m fine. Fine. Yesterday just got away from me.”

  “How—how is it?”

  What to tell her? Did he give her hope or prepare her for the moment it might die?

  “I’m getting there. He feels closer.”

  “You don’t know where he is?”

  “I think I do. I think he’s in the mountains.”

  He heard her sigh, and for the first time realized that his quest must be beginning to look very much like one of her husband’s. In and out, he had told her. A quick result. Then, he had been happy to play the savior, the wise man, the sane alternative to Ben’s madness. Now, all that felt foolish, and cheap. Not so noble, those first intentions.

  “Ike, it’s been days.”

  “I know.”

  “How long . . .”

  She couldn’t frame the question, but he knew what it was. How long before the odds lengthened into impossibility?

  He told her about Natela, and her conversation with Ben, and everything else that had set him on this course.

  “This is the closest I’ve been.”

  “She might have told you sooner.”

  She was afraid, he wanted to say but he didn’t want to explain why.

  “We’ll get there,” was all he said, and somehow he still meant it. “I’ll call when I can, but it’s wilderness up there.”

  He hung up. Inside, Koba was pushing his plate away, finally satisfied.

  Slowly the sky lightened, the lower peaks began to show themselves, and by the time Koba was drinking his second coffee and smoking his third cigarette the whole range could be seen: damp, forbidding, but no longer inundated. In Telavi the sun had begun to shine.

  “I make call,” said Koba, “then we go. My wife.” He wandered into the parking lot to make it.

  TWO

  The good roads were behind them now. For a while there was rough tarmac, and then the tarmac began to break up, and as they drew near the foothills they were on a wide track lined with trees, even enough but muddy after the rain and scattered with stones and potholes. Civilization began to slip away. They passed overgrown farmsteads, wild horses grazing under wet oaks, herds of bony cattle ambling about. From time to time the sun broke through and lit some part of the scene with glistening light, causing Hammer to forget his mission, forget the trials of the last four days, and wonder at the innocent perfection of the place, the magic of its simple elements.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said, more to himself than to Koba, and tried to remember the last time he had been in nature like this, with the world he knew unimaginable and forgotten.

  “Ya,” said Koba, unengaged.

  The road settled alongside a fast-flowing river and started to climb.

  Soon the river was far below them and the road had narrowed to a single rocky track, a foot wider than the car, that clung to the rocky hillside. Grass gave way to sinewy trees that still dripped after the rain, and hardy bushes sprouted over the cliff face. Every so often wooden posts set back in little clusters marked their progress. If Hammer looked down to his right all he saw was an abrupt and growing drop and a shoulder that just crumbled into space, but Koba charged on unaffected, taking corners at the same speed as the straights and letting the car veer wide in the mud as he fished in his top pocket for his cigarettes and rummaged in the glove box for his lighter. They might be in a hurry, Hammer told him at one point, but there was no need to rush on his account—as long as they arrived today. But Koba insisted he was taking it slowly, they’d be OK, and bristled, if anything, at the implied slight on his driving. Entrusting himself to the god of the road, Hammer held on. As long as they arrived.

  Perhaps because of the recent rain they saw few other cars going their way, and those they did see were soon compelled to stop on one of the rare stretches that were wide enough to let them by. The drop now was sheer, and already hundreds of feet. As Koba crept past them, no more than an inch away, Hammer forced himself to look ahead so that he couldn’t see how close the wheels beneath him were to the edge. At every moment he expected to feel them start to slip and then give.

  As a cursing Koba maneuvered around a Lada that was barely coping with the steeper stretches, Hammer got to inspect the wooden marker posts by the side of the road. There were three together, in the form of crosses, carefully made, and at each intersection was a faded portrait.

  “I guess they didn’t make it.”

  Koba, concentrating on the Lada, merely grunted.

  “The posts,” said Hammer.

  Koba glanced across. His mood seemed to be declining as they left his world behind. Hammer suspected that he was finding the driving more taxing than he let on. “Idiots. They drink, fall from mountain. You will see. All this people are idiots.”

  With a final curse he was free of the other car.

  “Should we help them?” said Hammer, looking back. “They’re never going to get up.”

  “I tell you. Idiots!”

  For all Koba’s dispatch, progress was slow. In a straight line it was only twelve miles to Omalo, where they were headed, but the road snaked so tightly upward, hairpin after hairpin, that ther
e were eighty to cover in all. After an hour the last straggling trees ran out and they emerged into sunshine; when he looked down, Hammer could see glimpses of the way they had come, the track winding in and out of sight hundreds of feet below, and beyond, already unimaginably remote, the distant plain. Above and around them were sublime peaks and green ridges folded like cloth.

  Another hour passed, his ears popped twice, the air grew cold, and still there seemed to be more mountain above them than there was below. Except to make the odd curse, Koba drove in silence now. Hammer’s conversation had dried up.

  “Fuck,” Koba said, straining to look at the road above them. Hammer followed his gaze, and saw, a hundred feet up, three vehicles in convoy, two of them the old army trucks he had grown used to seeing everywhere, and in between them a smaller white van.

  Within ten minutes they had caught up with the second truck as it waited for the first to pull the van through a particularly steep hairpin, its huge wheels laboring and slipping on the rocky ground. Somehow it managed it, whereupon both stopped, the rope was released, and they all set off lumbering toward the next turn. Koba looked at Hammer and slowly shook his head.

  “All way up,” he said. “You see. No way past. All way up.”

  This corner the van tried to take on its own, but it failed and the procedure was repeated. Koba turned off the engine and lit another cigarette, watching the group climbing at the slowest possible speed up one leg, then another, and another. Shadows began to appear on the eastern slopes. Hammer’s watch showed four.

  “Must be in Omalo before night,” said Koba.

  “There’s plenty of time.” He didn’t mean it. It was the hardest part of this whole thing, racing against time and having no idea how much was left.

  “Is dark early, the other side.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not good in dark.”

  For almost another hour they hung back, caught up, hung back, Koba occasionally trying to find a way around, frustrated now beyond measure. Dead pylons bent by winter snowfalls loomed over the road. Then, rounding a long corner, they found the first truck stopped in a crook of the track where it crossed a shallow stream, from which the driver and another man were filling a collection of plastic bottles. Koba saw his opportunity and moved sharply to the left to go past.

  “Stop!” shouted Hammer. What Koba had seen as a dip in the road was in fact the shoulder. There was no road, just space.

  Hammer felt the wheel underneath him lose grip and begin to slip away. There was nothing to check their fall but scree and scrub. By the stream the two men were shouting, their arms up in warning and disbelief.

  Koba braked hard, and the car’s three wheels scrabbled to a stop on the loose grit. Hammer, fear coursing through every part of him, looked across at Koba with astonishment and reproach, but Koba just stared straight ahead, his big face white and furious. Even in that moment Hammer felt a certain awe at the extent of the man’s pride.

  Koba put the car in reverse, checked twice that he had the right gear, and slowly took them back. Outside, the Georgians were incredulous and let Koba know it. Through the open window he shouted back.

  Hammer breathed deeply, but his pulse still raced. “I think I’d like a smoke,” he said.

  Still staring straight ahead, Koba removed the pack from his shirt pocket, took one for himself, and offered the rest to Hammer, who found the lighter in the glove box and lit first Koba’s, then his own. This cigarette was different from last night’s. Calming, yes, but not comforting. Two thoughts occupied him as he smoked: that if he and Koba had tumbled down the cliff, there was no one who might come for him as he had come for Ben; and that the only memorial he might leave behind was a cross at the side of this fucking road.

  “That was close,” he said, already thinking about Koba’s fury and the rest of the journey. “You did good.”

  But Koba either didn’t believe him or was still too angry—with himself, with the other drivers, with the mountains—to speak.

  “For a moment I thought you and I were going to have a nice little spot on the road, here, with a couple of crosses.” He gave Koba a chance to respond in kind. “We could have been together forever. People would have taken us for brothers.”

  Koba flicked his half-finished cigarette out of the window.

  “Idiots. Up here, like this.” His jaw jutted out as he shook his head. “Motherfuckers.”

  THREE

  They had to wait until the summit to pass the convoy, and the far side of the range was already in deep shadow. All the way Hammer had thought that every peak would be the last, but here it was finally clear that they had made it: behind and giddily far below them was the plain, and ahead a long green ridge curved down toward a high plateau, taking the road with it and drawing his eye to the distance, where, just emerging from the retreating band of dark clouds, were the real mountains, immense, snow-capped, unrelentingly endless, range upon range stretching into Russia.

  “Tell me we don’t have to go up there,” he said as they began to descend.

  “That is Caucasus,” said Koba, his first words since the incident besides great Georgian oaths.

  “To keep the Russians out.”

  “Russians not so bad. Better than mountain motherfuckers.”

  Miles above the world, and much further from his own, Hammer felt a simplicity settle on him, as if everything he had learned, everything he knew, had slipped away. How he wished Natela was with him.

  Slowly, they reconnected with the land. It was as if they’d been flying; the sense of potential collapse was the same. As the road slowly sank down, and the drop beside him diminished, and normal things began to appear—a river, a bridge, the first trees—he felt a great joy in seeing them that went beyond relief. Here again were the elements of things, which for years he hadn’t seen.

  Circled by mountains, Tusheti was a place of great quiet. The wind, fierce in the last stages of their ascent, had dropped to nothing, and the pines that bunched together on the gentle hills didn’t stir. Rough fences divided up the pasture where cows and horses grazed together; set back from the road were houses made of wood and piled slate. In the thinning twilight it felt like a place for fairy tales. There was no logic to it—he had no idea where it came from—but after the chaos and rage of the city and the trials of the last few days Hammer felt that this place was benign, and that he might be safe here. If Ben had come to harm here it was despite Tusheti, not because of it.

  They reached Omalo just as night was falling—too late for work but in time for dinner. On a hill above the road he could make out perhaps twenty wooden houses, only three of them lit up. By the first of these Koba pulled over, muttered something that Hammer didn’t catch, and stumped his way up some steps and along a balcony to the front door. Within a minute he was back.

  “This is place.”

  Hammer got out of the car, stretched his arms above his head, and breathed the sweet air, which was cool now and smelled of damp grass. His neck ached with the day’s tension. He wanted a bath, and a drink, and some time away from Koba.

  There was unloading to be done, and hosts to be greeted, and rooms to be chosen, but his first thought was to ask whether there was any signal in the village. There was, a thread, if you walked up to the top of the hill behind the house, and through it he picked up a single message, a voice mail from Hibbert, sounding less worried now than alarmed, to tell him that they had just a week left to prepare, and that a normal person would have been busy preparing. It wasn’t a reality Hammer could contemplate. When he was done, Koba wandered up after him and spent five minutes tapping out texts to his wife.

  The house was Henrikh and Irine’s, the Omalo Guesthouse, as it said on a hand-painted sign above the door, where for thirty lari, which Hammer insisted on paying in advance, travelers and hikers could spend the night in a simple, wood-lined room and be fed whatever it
was they ate in Tusheti. Tonight Hammer would not find out, because Koba was not ready for local food after the day he had had and insisted on taking over the kitchen to cook his own. Irine seemed not to mind, and provided him with knives for him to cut up his lamb, and skewers to run the pieces through. These he placed on the open fire, once he had seen to it that the coals were burned down and hot, and while they cooked he went to one of his bags and produced three old plastic water bottles full of brown liquid. Irine began to chop the vegetables they had brought, and Henrikh left them all to it.

  “Tonight, need chacha,” said Koba.

  Hammer saw no reason to argue. Koba poured two glasses—this was clearly not an honor to be conferred on mountain folk—and passed one to Hammer, who waited politely for his first proper Georgian toast. It was warm in here, and the air was beginning to fill with smoke from the lamb fat dripping onto the fire. With his elbow high, Koba held up his glass and looked Hammer in the eye.

  “Georgia is beautiful country. Very beautiful. Old country. Old as mountains.” Hammer doubted this, but kept quiet. Koba had the air of someone who was not to be interrupted. “People try, hurt Georgia. Muslims from Turkey, Iran, Genghis Khan—all people. Now, people hurt Georgia from inside. President, politicians. No jobs, people hungry. Young people not marry. Tbilisi full of . . . how you say? Men who like men?”

  Hammer closed his eyes. This was a new side of Koba that he didn’t relish coming to know. Next it would be the Jews.

  “We say gay. Gay men.”

  “Ya, gay. Tbilisi full of gays. Women wear nothing, in church wear nothing. But. But.” He punctuated this turning point with his glass. “Georgia survive. Always it survives. We get new president, will be new times, more like old times. So. Toast. New day for Georgia.”

  He raised his glass another inch, touched it against Hammer’s, shouted “Gaumarjos!” and downed the chacha in a gulp, keeping his eyes on Hammer’s throughout. When he was done he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and beamed. “Come. Drink!”