Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  I lay awake the night before, thinking about the imprudence of trying to gain entrance to yet another besieged city. Wind and rain drummed against Tbilisi’s endless maze of galvanized zinc roofs, an electric heater inert at the foot of my bed. The device itself was a thin piece of wire wrapped around a ceramic cylinder; a death trap in a midnight stumble. Happily, a power outage had rendered the thing temporarily impotent, and me freezing.

  Tbilisi had taken on the kind of atmosphere that often follows humiliating defeats: resigned apathy, mixed with an increasing sense of nihilism.

  Violent young men lurked in the shadows, and you knew it.

  In the morning I forced myself out of bed and headed toward our office on Rustaveli Avenue on the fifth floor of a building with a semipermanently broken elevator. There I met up with my cameraman, Sergiy, to figure out how to get to Zugdidi for Zviad’s last stand. There was such a plethora of great bad options. The main road was cut by skirmishes, and the rest of the roads were usually little more than neglected dirt tracks.

  As we prepared to head out, a group of scruffy paramilitary-looking types (by now simply meaning men with guns) banged on the office door, mistaking it for someone else’s. They were headed for the “front” to do battle with the “Zviadists,” they explained.

  One of the men eyed a cheap, poorly produced, and (as it turned out) inaccurate road map of Georgia that I’d taped up on the wall behind my desk.

  “Where is Samtredia?” he demanded.

  “Here,” I said, pointing to the town in western Georgia of that name. It was along the main highway, supposedly the epicenter of the new war.

  “Gmadlobt,” said the man, thanking me in Georgian, and turned to go.

  “Just a second,” I said, ripping the fifty-cent piece of cartography off the wall and thrusting it at him. “Take it!”

  If these “government forces” had no idea where Samtredia was, they were in far worse shape than we were but at least might recognize us before they shot, thanks to my map gift.

  The boys left on their mission, and Sergiy and I soon followed them westward toward the Black Sea and the “front lines” (a loose designation at best) in our beat-up Russian Niva four-wheel drive. The road was full of potholes, meaning, by the standards of the time, in fairly good shape.

  WE STOPPED FOR a meal in the lone functioning canteen in Georgia’s second city, Kutaisi, the legendary capital of the ancient kingdom of Colchis. The eleventh-century Bagrati Cathedral, still in ruins 301 years after Ottoman conquerors blew it up in 1692 (talk about a slow repair job), brooded over the city from atop a cliff. Jason and the Argonauts, in their epic quest for the Golden Fleece, had Kutaisi as their final destination—King Aeëtes’ seat of power.

  The canteen had no seats, so we stood while eating beef stew and large pieces of Georgian tonis puri, bread baked on the sides of an ancient kiln, washing it down with a quirky, unique-to-Georgia, antifreeze-colored, tarragon-flavored soft drink. At 6,400,000 and something, the bill sounded steep for some slop and bread. But the currency at the time was the infamous interim Georgian “coupon,” looking like xeroxed Monopoly money and then trading on world currency markets at something like 2 million to the dollar. I’d never given a million anything as a tip. I did so, and my mood improved.

  We continued west along the main road under a light rain. There was no point in continuing on the main highway through Samtredia. It had been “conquered” and “retaken” by first the “Zviadists” and then the “government” on almost a daily basis. One day, a few “government” troops would roll forward with a tank or two, stand around, and pull back when a few dozen Zviadists—those who hadn’t fled Shevardnadze’s Russian enemies-turned-allies—would roll in. The next day, the reverse would happen.

  Rather than endure such theatrics, we chose a route marked yellow on our map, designating a secondary road, supposedly in reasonably good condition, that would bring us across the lines. Instead we found a wide, formerly asphalted rut leading through a forest.

  Places of war need not be tormentingly depressing, although many, if not most, are. Yet in much of western Georgia, it was hard to believe any conflict was going on at all.

  Streams of gentle autumn light poked through the lush subtropical foliage.

  Palms whispered in the breeze.

  In tiny villages, women in straw hats sold sunflower seeds wrapped in pages ripped out of discarded editions of Gogol.

  Cows meandered amid tea plantations.

  As we admired the landscape, three more scraggly, Kalashnikov-toting men (God knows fighting for whom) flagged down our car.

  They were proud Zviadists, they explained, but on the run in the face of the Russian intervention.

  “That fucking Shevardnadze,” one said. “He lets the Russians take Sukhumi, and then he brings them in to do his dirty work. He is nothing but an occupier and a KGB agent.”

  “Turn down that road,” one said, pointing to another muddy track with bits of asphalt remaining here and there.

  We didn’t argue.

  Within five minutes we hit a water-covered rut with such force that the speedometer console fell out onto my lap. I argued with the gunmen about where the hell they were taking us. Another five minutes later, the trio hopped out at an intersection, expressing no remorse for the assorted gauges now adorning my lap. I ripped out the wires and tossed them in the back of the car. Our relief in reaching Zugdidi, Gamsakhurdia’s laststand fortress, was short lived.

  No one was really in control of the Zviadist “capital.” A panicky gathering milled around the local administration building, speculating about the Russians being on the way or trading rumors. We deferentially checked in to see if we needed some sort of “accreditation” from the “authorities.” Instead we found only a room full of “officials” chattering away. One wrote down our names. Accreditations? “No, we don’t have any of those,” he said.

  We asked for a meeting with “President Gamsakhurdia.” Loud assurances were given that he was on his way. When? Soon! Where? “Right here.” “Over there.” “At the stadium.” “In the central square.”

  Gamsakhurdia was trapped. Confusion reigned. Some of his fighters were driving up and down the main street in a stolen Red Cross four-wheel drive, aimlessly, an act of final defiance. The sight of the vehicle, jammed with paramilitaries, Kalashnikovs pointed out the windows, fit the mood perfectly because the more delirious Zviadists were convinced the International Red Cross was an intelligence front.

  We crossed the street to a building where we were told we could find a man by the name of Jambul, Zviad’s self-described “chief of security.”

  We found him, but the man was so drunk that he was swaggering as he stood. “The president is not available,” Jambul said gravely.

  Suddenly shooting began outside the building. We were convinced the government had decided to storm the city. We hit the floor. But the crackle of Kalashnikovs ceased abruptly after a minute. We emerged from the building. A warlord by the name of Vakhtang “Loti” (meaning “The Drunk” in Georgian) Kobalia had arrived; the volley of gunfire was a celebratory greeting.

  Kobalia’s nickname was said to be fitting. The root of his surname was equally ironic. Kobali means “bread” in Megrelian, the local Georgian dialect used in the area, and Kobalia had indeed been a bread truck driver in Soviet times before launching his paramilitary career.

  Vakhtang “The Drunk” had fought on Zviad’s side during the first civil war, running the Megrelia area as a kind of fiefdom and a safe-haven for supporters of the ousted Gamsakhurdia government before making some sort of peace with Shevardnadze. But Kobalia’s detractors said Kobalia’s forces fought halfheartedly in order to ensure Shevardnadze’s defeat in the final days of the war in Abkhazia, ultimately switching back to Gamsakhurdia’s side, just in time for his last stand.

  I AGAIN ASKED Jambul about Gamsakhurdia’s whereabouts. “That’s a state secret,” he said, as if Gamsakhurdia actually controlled a county, let a
lone a country. There was no chance of an interview, he said. “It’s getting dark. I’d advise you to get out of here, for your own safety.”

  Drunken security chiefs not being known for caution, we promptly obliged and headed down a back road again toward Tbilisi, becoming completely lost in a worsening downpour. Two men stood near an intersection, both of them brandishing Kalashnikovs. Sergiy decided to ask them for directions.

  Not a good idea, it turned out.

  The two were agitated and demanded to see our documents. We assumed they were Zviadists, so we tried to get in their good graces by emphasizing that we had just come from Zugdidi, where we had met with members of his “government.”

  “We’re Zviadists, all right,” growled one of the pair. “But we could drink his blood tomorrow if we want.”

  Loyalties were breaking down, and the conversation soon grew from uncomfortable to threatening. I was ordered by the gunman on my side of the car to empty my wallet. It contained $140, but I was not particularly upset, because it could have been much worse: I had $5,000 stashed in a duffel bag in the back of the jeep, having made a cash run to Reuters in Moscow a few days earlier and forgotten I’d stashed away the money. Happily, the thugs weren’t very thorough with their shakedown.

  Then came the subject of our TV camera, which Sergiy was holding in his lap. It was a Sony professional unit, and worth ten thousand dollars. The gunman on the passenger side grabbed the lens and began pulling the camera away. Sergiy tugged back, an act of audacity that startled the gunmen.

  “Look,” the one on the left explained. “We could kill you right here and toss you in a ditch to die,” he raged. “Give us the fucking camera.” The tug of war resumed.

  Sagely, Sergiy appealed to the men’s sense of masculine honor, a holdover from better times before their homeland and Georgian way of life were ravaged by poverty and upheaval.

  “Please understand,” reasoned Sergiy. “If you take this camera, which is of no use to you, you will deprive me of my livelihood. I have hungry mouths to feed at home. I won’t even be able to buy bread for my children.”

  Suddenly, along this muddy, rainy road in the middle of a forest where the thieves had no reason not to strip us of everything we owned, time stood still.

  The gunmen went silent.

  Sergiy had uttered the magical words: children, bread.

  These were brutal days: creeds, rules, and laws eroding quickly.

  Yet the storied sense of Georgian respect for guests, and the country’s cult of the sacredness of the child, still held sway.

  The gunman released his grip on the lens, his hands slipping away, as if greased, leaving Sergiy with the camera, and the man with the gun, and the power to exterminate us, slowly closed the car door himself.

  WE RETURNED WITHOUT our interview. In fact, Gamsakhurdia never gave another one, melting instead into the hills and gorges to ponder the last days of his life.

  Within a few weeks, on New Year’s Eve of 1994, the end came. A single shot from a pistol penetrated the side of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s head. The venue was a farmhouse amid a nondescript village in western Georgia, far from presidential glory in Tbilisi. The government claimed it was a suicide. His devoted followers shouted murder. Gamsakhurdia was dead, but a decade-and-a-half epic had been born—the story of his wandering corpse, and the unclear circumstances of his demise.

  AT FIRST GAMSAKHURDIA’S resting place next to a farmhouse is kept secret, a select few performing the burial. Then he is dug up a second time and moved again, just in case a mole had leaked the location. Zviad’s supporters, however, see the lack of a body as proof that he is alive. He is not dead, they insist; all such reports are merely propaganda.

  Then, in late February, a Chechen plane lands in western Georgia on a special mission. Gamsakhurdia’s volatile widow, Manana, refused to let his corpse rest in the “junta-dominated” Georgia of Shevardnadze, as Zviad’s supporters called Shevardnadze’s government. A Georgian delegation meets the Chechens, and together they fly by helicopter to the obscure village where Zviad is buried. There, men with simple shovels dig clinically, deliberately. Their expressions bear neither gravity nor sorrow. The process is not a long one. A simple handmade wooden coffin emerges, the type that a typical villager might be entombed in. The men hastily carry it off to the waiting helicopter. Stalks of straw from the farmhouses fly about as the whirl of the blades carries the coffin into the sky.

  A BITING COLD envelops those of us assembled along the tarmac as we wait for the flying hearse to land.

  But once the wooden coffin is unloaded, the Chechens who came to fetch Gamsakhurdia’s remains look startled. They evidently assume the dead president had been buried Muslim-style without a casket. The Chechens have brought along their own zinc coffin in which to transport him to Grozny. An eerie spectacle ensues—the presence of the empty zinc coffin is a bad omen in Chechen culture, we are told. Removing the empty zinc box from their plane, the Chechens place it in the center of the runway. A large truck belching blue smoke arrives, and the Chechens proceed to drive it over the zinc box, over and over, until nothing remains but a mangled hunk of twisted metal, evidently satisfied that the lurking evil spirits inhabiting it are now destroyed.

  Next begins the haggling between the Georgian government delegation and the Chechen undertakers over what to do with Gamsakhurdia’s coffin. The Chechens, led by their vice president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, insist it be immediately loaded onto his plane and flown back to Grozny. The Georgians insist on verifying, unscientifically, that it is actually Gamsakhurdia lying inside. The Chechens resist, saying opening it would be sacrilege. One of the Georgians responds by pointing out that Gamsakhurdia was an Orthodox Christian, not a Muslim Chechen. The Georgians refuse to allow the coffin to be loaded into the plane. Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s corpse, now almost an afterthought, lying in the middle of the cracked asphalt runway as the officials argue.

  The Chechens finally relent, and agree to a brief opening of the coffin for verification. Several of us crowd around it, its pale wood now damp and earthen colored after almost two months in the winter ground; there is something of a morbid anxiousness to it all.

  The Georgians begin carefully prying the cover off with chisels, and slowly the lid slides open. Without formaldehyde or other embalming agents, biological processes have taken their course. Zviad is gaunt. But although I am “meeting” him for the first time, there is no doubt it is Gamsakhurdia, his unique, chiseled facial features still unmistakable. He is dressed in a black and white suit, his simple dark tie blotched with specks of green. Perhaps most curiously of all, the ousted president wears no shoes. (This elicits rumors of all fashions, noteworthy among them that Gamsakhurdia, an Orthodox Christian, converted to Islam before his death. Which makes no sense. Had he converted to Islam, he would have been buried in a shroud, not a coffin.)

  A Georgian official lowers his head toward Gamsakhurdia’s, like a man checking a diamond for authenticity, and squints. It’s the bullet hole he’s interested in. Indeed it is there, on the right side of the president’s head, partially obscured by some sort of mold, but still clearly visible. The viewing is over within a minute or two. The Georgians put the lid back on, as if putting the cover back on a tub of margarine. The corpse takes off into the sky.

  IN GROZNY, THERE was a splendid state funeral for Gamsakhurdia. He was then interred in the garden of the stately Chechen guest mansion where he had spent a year in exile. A white stallion led the cortege, which was wholly appropriate because the white horse is linked with Persian and Zoroastrian mythology and was a constant in the Zviadist iconography of light against darkness and good against evil. After his 1992 ouster in Tbilisi, no fewer than twenty thousand of his supporters marched along a riverbank, a woman riding such a steed, and those devotees who refused to believe in his indisputable death continued to insist he would return one day, of course atop a white stallion.

  I have already described his pedigree—the son of Georgia’s most
famous writer and philosopher—his acts of anti-Soviet defiance, and his explosive personality, all of which earned Zviad Gamsakhurdia his credibility as national-savior-to-be.

  Zviad’s vision of Georgia’s unique role in the world certainly played a role in his mystique. His supporters peddled a pamphlet called The Spiritual Mission of the Georgian Nation. It was based on an erudite, obscurantist 1990 speech Zviad gave at Tbilisi’s Philharmonic Hall in which it was suggested that Georgia was meant by God to serve as a link between Occident and Orient, thus fulfilling its supposedly unique destiny.

  But there are other reasons, far more intoxicating, for the often maniacal degree of devotion one found among Zviad’s hard-core supporters—again, a disproportionate number of them middle-aged and older women, spinsters in a land where ordinary outlets of passion were greatly constrained at the time: a psychosexual appeal, a surrogate for unrealized desires.

  Zviad’s sometimes reserved, sometimes bombastic, enigmatic personality, prone to seeing provocations and blackmail, added to the mystique.

  For many years after his death, on Zviad’s birthday or that of his literary-giant late father, large crowds of those devotees, these insurgents who believe in Zviad’s return or resurrection, gathered at the Gamsakhurdia family compound—a very large brick home in the center of Tbilisi. Often there were well over a thousand of them. They marched along the narrow streets, pushing and shoving to get closer to the shrine. Again, most were women, disproportionately middle-aged and older, dressed in black, most in long skirts, and slightly frumpy, flat black simple nylons. So ubiquitous are the nylon-wearers that the dead Gamsakhurdia’s army of female devotees are known as the Shavi Kolgotebi (the Black Stockings).

  A MAN IN wire-rimmed glasses rants through a megaphone about what they called the “junta” (Shevardnadze) running Georgia and about Gamsakhurdia, who many here still insist is alive, one day to return on that white horse. Some of the Black Stockings appear to be in a trancelike state, eyes fixated on the podium, hands clutching umbrellas used as parasols to parry a searing sun. Listening intently, one of the women teeters. Her eyeballs roll back in her head briefly, facial muscles twitching and then relaxing, eyes becoming placid again. Orgasm, or the cusp of one.