“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 r
eplenish 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?”
“I said silence!”
The students lower their chins and quiet themselves. Soso and his friends pull their chairs closer to the table. “Hey,” Kapanadze whispers to Vano, “I heard something this morning about your brother leaving Kiev.”
Vano adjusts his round glasses and raises his bushy eyebrows. “Where’d you hear that?”
“From Parkadze and Devdariani. They said he’s coming back to Georgia. Is it true?”
“What do those two idiots know about it?” says Soso.
Vano glances from side to side to ensure that no priests are listening. He hunches closer to the table, drawing in the others with the prospect of new information about his famous brother. Lado Ketskhoveli is perhaps the most famous of the student revolutionaries, having once organized a protest so effective that it shut the seminary down for several weeks. Under orders from the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police—who know all too well how violent students mature into cold-blooded opponents of the Russian Empire—Lado was expelled and forced into exile at the Kiev Seminary. While finishing his studies there, he met and paired up with another legendary ex-Tiflis seminarian, Silva Jibladze, who was in hiding from the Okhrana in Kiev. Jibladze was even more radical than Lado. He’d killed a rector at the Tiflis Seminary with his Georgian sword and then had to escape in the middle of the night. It was said that Lado and the young killer were agitating for revolution with the socialists in Kiev.
“It’s true I got a letter from him, yes,” whispers Vano Ketskhoveli.
Soso clenches his fists beneath the table, pained that Ilya Parkadze, Seid Devdariani, and Vano all know more about Lado’s plans than he does. It doesn’t make any sense. Lado always seemed to like and admire Soso, ever since their early days in Gori, when Soso was a child and Lado nothing more than the local priest’s eldest son. Why would he convey his secret intentions to cowards like Ilya and Seid, or to his thick and myopic brother—a boy who hasn’t even read the most basic Marxist writers like Plekhanov—instead of to the brilliant Soso Djugashvili? Surely Lado trusts him more than he could ever trust Vano or the others. Didn’t he once take Soso to the Gori bookshop, pay his lending fee, and even insist on him reading On the Origin of Species? Why would he do that unless he understood Soso’s potential as a comrade—unless he trusted him? Biological brotherhood means less to a hero like Lado than the camaraderie of like-minded revolutionaries.
“He writes in secret code,” whispers Vano to his friends. “For everyone’s security. So only I can read it. And I burn his letters straight away.”
That’s why, thinks Soso, his knuckles turning white under the table. Lado hasn’t yet had the chance to teach his other comrades the code. But then how did Parkadze and Devdariani know everything?
“The movement’s building in Kiev,” says Vano. “He says he’s done with his work there. So yes, it’s true, he wants to return. As soon as the Okhrana forget his expulsion, he’ll sneak into Georgia. In the spring, or maybe sooner. You never know with him. Lado’s not one to avoid a risk.”
“That’s for sure,” says Kapanadze.
“He’d come back though it’s forbidden?” asks Iremashvili.
“Don’t be stupid,” grumbles Soso. “Banishment is nothing for a revolutionary. I’d defy the order myself.”
“Me too,” says Kapanadze.
“Me too,” adds Vano, but with less enthusiasm.
“I doubt that,” says Soso, glaring hard across the table at the great Lado’s inferior younger brother.
“I guess I’d defy it too,” adds Iremashvili, although everybody knows he doesn’t mean it.
“Lado’s not afraid of the Okhrana,” says Soso. “He’d spit in their faces, even in jail.”
“He’d spit into the eyes of a bear.”
“A mother bear,” laughs Iremashvili. “And her cub!”
“I’ll bet when he comes back, he’ll kill Serafim or Abashidze,” says Kapanadze. “Just like Jibladze did. Did he say anything about it?”
“Nothing,” says Vano, shrugging.
“He’s probably planning it.”
“Let him take out Serafim,” mutters Soso. “But we should be the ones to take out Black Spot. That’ll show Lado our solidarity.”
“And for revenge,” says Kapanadze.
“We should do it.”
“We should.”
“They’ve got it coming.”
The big bell clangs in the hall, ending the time allotted for their meal. The priest Alexandre, standing by the samovar, announces that the front gates will soon be opened for the students’ weekly free time in Tiflis. The boys clean up their places, rinsing their glasses in a bowl of lukewarm water on the serving table and r
eturning them to the shelf. They trot out of the refectory and approach the doors to the portico, where they wait with a growing congregation of seminarians hopping excitedly from foot to foot. Two attending monks slide the metal gate aside and pry the door open.
After quick mock-solemn bows, signs of the cross, and words of praise for their priests and masters, the four teenagers hurry out of Tiflis Theological Seminary into the brightness of Yerevan Square. Standing on the marble steps, they squint in the midday light. The brightness stabs their eyes after so many days in the gloomy and oppressive seminary. They have exactly two hours before they have to return.
They climb the narrow and steep road into the Armenian Bazaar, chatting boisterously. The tiny street is lined with wine merchants and bakers, their fragrant shops laden with swollen sheep skins hanging from nails, and flatbreads roasting in huge clay ovens so powerful that their heat is felt in the street. The boys laugh and joke as they weave past a couple of itinerant vegetable dealers with wooden trays balanced on their heads, a Tartar mullah in a white turban, and an old, ruined prince with a staggering gait and bloodshot eyes, struggling with the fingering for a common tune on his duduki pipe. Kapanadze skips over a mound of camel dung and stumbles against a burly mountain peasant, knocking his shaggy hat off. He apologizes, picks up the grumbling Chechen’s cap, and returns it to him.
The group enters a Persian neighbourhood, full of steaming bathhouses that stink of rotten eggs from the sulphuric hot springs. They climb a steep hill, which rises up to Holy Mountain and the ancient, prison-like Metekhi fortress. Vano and Iremashvili scoop rocks from the road and challenge each other to a skipping contest on the cobblestones. Soso lets his friends pull ahead. A little distance is important—essential, even—if he’s going to clear his head and prepare himself for Lado’s arrival. Soso lowers his eyes and tries to give the upcoming event proper consideration.
He imagines Lado Ketskhoveli—an image in earthy tones, the muted oranges and browns of cheap icons nailed to the chapel walls. Lado’s a handsome man, taller than the average Georgian, with a reticent but mirthful stare beneath his high forehead. His beard is thick and full, his moustache wide and curled. He has neither the thick brow nor the burly mien of Vano, his inferior brother. Soso allows himself to imagine a gold-leafed halo painted above Lado’s head. The priests may have commanded Soso to revere the living Jesus, even to taste his flesh and blood, but Lado is the only saint whose material being cannot be denied.
The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers Page 11