Avelum a survey of the c.., p.1
Avelum (A Survey of the Current Press and a Few Love Affairs), page 1
Avelum
original Georgian title
Avelumi (1995)
also by Otar Chiladze
A Man Was Going Down the Road [gzaze erti katsi midioda, 1972],
published in English 2012
Otar Chiladze
Avelum
(A Survey of the Current Press and a Few Love Affairs)
translated by Donald Rayfield
GARNETT PRESS
LONDON
first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
The Garnett Press,
Dpt of Russian (SML)
Queen Mary (University of London),
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
© Otar Chiladze
this translation into English: © Donald Rayfield
this edition: © Garnett Press
typeset in Times New Roman
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the publisher of this book
Illustrations:
Dust jacket (clockwise from centre left):
(2 photos) demonstrators at Stalin monument, March 1956
(Interior Ministry archives, courtesy Omar Tushurashvili);
girl demonstrator 9 April 1989 (photo by Iuri Mechitov, flipped)
p. 6: Sumerian deities.
This book is published with the support of the
Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia
ISBN 978-0-9564683-1-4
Introduction
Otar Chiladze (1933–2009) is arguably Georgia’s greatest 20th-century prose writer. Influenced by myth, from the story of Gilgamesh to Daedalus and Icarus, his six novels have taken him from 700 BC to 1991 AD, from legendary Vani in Colchis, to modern Tbilisi and Moscow. Tragedy, political indignation, ironic humour, surreal imagination, subtle psychological analysis and a virtuoso narrative gift combine to make him a writer of international significance. He is remarkable for his originality, and for his refusal to have any truck with official ideology. Highly popular among Russian, as well as Georgian readers, he is, however, still little known in the West.
His first novel, A Man Was Going Down the Road, published in 1972 won wide acceptance from Georgian readers and, in translation, from Russian readers, as an exploration of the legend of Jason and Medea and the consequences for Colchis, Medea’s homeland, of her abduction. The Soviet censor overlooked what more sophisticated readers perceived: that the legend was an allegory of Russian and Soviet conquest and enslavement of Georgia, that the Cretan King Minos who master-minded Jason’s exploits was an earlier incarnation of Tsar Alexander I and Stalin. Other readers appreciated what was rare in Soviet literature, a study of the bleak life of an intellectual hero who, in pursuing his ideals, destroys his family and is destroyed by society.
These themes underlie the next three novels which Chiladze published between 1976 and 1987, all set in more recent Georgian history.
This, his fifth novel, was published in 1995 and is the second to be translated into English. It strikes out in new directions: it is not just free (i.e. post-Soviet), but passionately personal. The story of a writer whose private ‘empire of love’ collapses together with the ‘Empire of Evil’, it reflects life both in a decaying USSR and an independent, but strife-torn Georgia. Chiladze vents his indignation at the fate of Georgia, particularly over 33 years, Christ’s lifetime, between the Tbilisi massacres by Soviet special forces of March 1956 and April 1989. This is a deeply personal work (but we must not identify the hero Avelum with his creator, even though Avelum is a novelist whose themes of the Minotaur and Icarus resemble Chiladze’s own). Its plot centres on a love affair between a western girl and a Soviet writer, and on the tragedy of an idealist who damages irreparably every woman he cares for, and, in the end, himself. Chiladze gave his hero the name Avelum: a Sumerian and Akkadian term meaning ‘free man’: ancient Anatolian myth and legend are fundamental to all Chiladze’s work, particular his fine body of poetry (he also wrote two plays).
The novel cites names unfamiliar to westerners: I usually embody an explanatory phrase in the text, in a few cases I add an asterisk, referring readers to notes on p. 349. In one case, I invent an English nickname for a transient caricature: e.g. a russified Georgian peasant-cum-party official becomes Yokel Bumpkinovich. Other persons, places and events that Chiladze mentions can be identified through Wikipedia.
I have had much constructive help from Tamar and Zaza Chiladze, and from Shukia Apridonidze. I only regret that this translation did not appear four years ago, when Otar Chiladze was still alive. For all his modesty he would have valued an English readership.
For photographic material I thank Iuri Mechitov and Omar Tushurashvili.
Donald Rayfield Otford, Kent, March 2013
CHAPTER ONE
D
ear idle reader, take it from me: it would have been much better if the person I mean to talk to you about (or, to be precise, the person whose spokesman I am) had written the story of his life himself. Anyway, from time to time you will probably have trouble telling us apart, and this will give your reading a lot of inner freedom, as well as a certain amount of confusion. You can imagine either of us as the author or the hero, and not only because we, the author and the hero, have lived at the same time in the same country, in the same city, in identical circumstances, but also because (and this I believe to be the decisive factor) our complicity has been, for better or for worse, ordained by fate, and I have shared his troubles and his joys, I have been his confidant, though, unlike me (or us) he was named Avelum at birth, whereas we, his associates, are just becoming a bit Avelumised.
As for the name Avelum, it is Sumerian and means ‘free citizen with full civic rights’, although the only source I have for this etymology is an old notebook of mine. But I now have trouble working out why I ever needed to copy out this word (assuming it really is Sumerian), or making it up (if I really made it up). The main thing is that the meaning remains unchanged: it still means what it means, as a great Sumerian or a petty descendant (I mean me) of the Sumerians decided at the time. To what extent the word has any meaning today, or to use the language of our newspapers, to what extent it is relevant and meets the demands of life today… but what I want to get over to the reader is that all his life Avelum has tried in every way to be just that — a free citizen with full civic rights of a country, even if that country only exists in his imagination. I may remind you that this is not easy to achieve, and he couldn’t have achieved it (if he ever did, in fact), had he spent a single day without love. Only love enabled him to feel freedom and civic entitlement, and he fought selflessly and endlessly — senselessly and futilely, you might think — to salvage what we call love, what transforms human beings’ earthly existence into life, even if it doesn’t actually amount to a general, universal, let alone obligatory requirement, but remains to the end an aspiration, an urgency, a dream, a whim of separate individuals who have gone mad, each in their own way. Insignificant, pathetic crumbs of these feelings can probably be detected in the memories and in remote corners of the hearts of every one of us, like shotgun pellets in the muscles or joints of a game animal, so that they might as well not even exist.
As for not existing, here I am, writing without knowing how on earth to use words to convey non-existence. It would be like crowning the wind with a wreath of dry leaves (although I do of course know where the wind begins and ends). Therefore this missive won’t, dear idle reader, be reading matter as interesting as an inquisitive woman’s diary, nor will it be as instructive as the memoirs of a man who has been through the mill in his time. But writing is in itself an extremely characteristic feature of love. Today there are many types of ‘epistolary’ relations — telephones, intercom, audio-visual equipment — but written letters are still the basis of the anachronism which the empire of love has become. We can boldly say that humanity has exhausted its whole life seeking and devising means of concealing what is to be written and deciphering what has been written. Whatever they write in — spurge or onion juice, fig-tree sap or toad’s blood, raven’s bile or whale sperm — somehow to keep some obvious ‘secret’ ineffably hidden from everyone, at the same time they can’t help destroying every trace of their real meaning, because they are too careful, too cowardly, too crazy or too stupid. That is why the best examples of the epistolary genre, like uncurbed dreamers and unbridled freedom-lovers, end their existence by being incinerated, so that no trace of their existence, except ashes, remains. But this long-suffering and unfairly disliked genre, I am deeply convinced, is still irreplaceable, all the more so because its capacity and its durability are mind-boggling. It will accommodate whatever you entrust to it, it will endure whatever you inflict on it. Obviously, since I am still writing this ordinary stuff, I believe in it, in its viability and that in the future someone really will read my sinful scribblings. Frankly, writing is solely an indomitable desire to have one’s voice heard by somebody: if they can’t understand you, let them at least listen. It’s a voluntary act of self-revelation, but, at the same time, if you ask me, it can’t be very polite to pester complete strangers and whinge about pain which cannot possibl
Today, one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-nine years after the fruitful incarnation of the Son of God, several forms of Chernobyl flu are simultaneously raging in the most beautiful of the cities of the Caucasus. Spring, however, has once again, as usual, spoiled everything around: again, it has left its damp fingerprints on the ugly, lifeless houses, which the eyes of boys and girls, newly-fledged in the interminable winter, perceive in the school lavatories as examples of obscene art or of artistic obscenity. The steps leading down to the underground crossing are littered with scraps of a torn playing card. At the top of the steps a gypsy woman, like the hostess of the underworld, greets her fear-stricken fellow-citizens, as they come towards her. In one hand she holds a small, round, rusty tin box, filled with ‘fortune tickets’; a yellow bird, the ‘fortune-teller’, its pet name ‘Boria’, sits hunched in her other hand. Boria can instantly (for just twenty kopecks) lead you out of the fog of uncertainty and ‘tell’ you what to expect. But such knowledge is what people are most afraid of, and, plunged in gloom, they run off down the narrow tunnel, business-like, as if they really had somewhere to hurry to. The antediluvian trolley-buses, so old that they list to one side, vibrate as they splash through torrents of sewage. The potholes are full of foul, foaming water of unspeakable origin. The pavements are strewn with drowned rats, their bellies bloated, their legs splayed. There are long queues outside the chemist’s: people are cowed, short-tempered, impatient: suddenly someone will stagger, flap like a dying catfish’s tail, and then go rigid again for a while. People shelter behind each other’s backs and then become even more fearful: ‘Have you heard? Did you know? Forty more people died yesterday.’ ‘Forty?! Eighteen, didn’t they say?’ ‘No, go on with you!’
Who’d be so idiotic as to send you flu to kill a mere eighteen people, especially over such a distance? People turn nasty when they’re waiting for medicine. This, too, could be blamed on spring: everything gets more complicated in spring, however amazing we may find it. Take just going to the cemetery. The mourners lose their shoes in mud as thick as porridge. There are no flowers to be had. If you can find any, you can’t buy them, the price would kill you. You have to put a plastic flower in your pocket. An everlasting one. You put it there temporarily at the deceased’s feet, you shake it about and then you take it back, in the hope of finding something better tomorrow. Life is such a bitch, it’ll make a fool of a corpse. But nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow — not just tomorrow, today: they don’t know if they’ll be alive an hour later or at all. That’s why we talk so much, pound the cemetery mud, or queue up for medicine. We talk to hide our ignorance. How many seconds does it take, do you think, for an hour to pass? Are you asking me? Yes, sir, it’s you I’m asking. I’m next after you. That doesn’t mean a thing. If you give me an answer, I’ll let you have my place in the queue. About three thousand six hundred, I suppose. Are you sure? I was sure, but now I’m not. I agree with you on that. Nobody’s sure of anything now. We expect it, we strive for it and… we’re afraid. No. The reason we’re afraid is that we weren’t expecting it. We weren’t even thinking about it. Who would have thought? What just yesterday we thought was eternal has suddenly turned out to be the past. Only one of Lenin’s legs, and only the bit below the knee, is left standing on the plinth. But does that mean anything? Could it ever come back? Anyway, I saw it with my own eyes being paraded all round the city, like an ogre’s corpse, splattered with red paint. Children were following it, shrieking and squealing. Yet, even the devil doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and I’m talking about ordinary straight knowledge, not poetic or philosophical intuition: tomorrow, today in fact, in our real world, let’s say by midnight (in my youth, when we used sometimes to hang about until late in a café, the headwaiter’s physical appearance, not just his mood, used to change then — a constantly smiling and jovial host would turn into a blank, frozen-brained psychopath, just because — there was no explicable sign why, what had come over him, whether the job had got on top of him, or all the things we had said had piled up into one great memorandum, or he had simply split into two: pre-midnight and post-midnight versions). With baited breath and eyes tight shut, a devil surveys everything, whatever time the clock may show, until our letter reaches a non-existent addressee in a non-existent future.
In fact, it’s the easiest thing for humanity to have no definite so-called future, or tomorrow, in the poetic, philosophical or, of course, straightforward human concept. As someone who relies on today, I can find more than sufficient audacity (which is permissible) and good reason to say this, and no harm will be done if I stick my nose out for a moment from my lair (or my own heart) and reveal this universally terrifying doubt. In fact, it’s my duty to do so. Since I’ve volunteered to be frank about the future, somehow I have to keep it up. Of course, the secret of how I decide to deal with it is my property, and mine alone: if I want, I shall keep it secret (humanity won’t be any the worse off), if I want, I shall divulge it (to satisfy my burning urge), but my main secret is the fact that I have nothing to hide. To be precise, I’m not afraid of anything, not the treachery of the present, nor the indifference of the future. Though I’d be more truthful if I said the opposite: I’m afraid of both. But a third fear, a fear of personal obliteration, outweighs these two so much, that I think I could stuff my secret down somebody, in the very faint hope, which stultifies millions and millions of people, that somebody some time might… and if that is really so, then everyone should magnanimously forgive me from the bottom of their heart for trying, unasked, arrogantly, inspired by purely personal motives, to invade someone else’s life, or for demanding from a non-existent future the attention and sympathy that I wouldn’t demand of the present (and if I did, nothing would be altered in the slightest), a demand which is normal for any human being. But I must confess that I have an unfathomable fear of the abstract future, though this ‘writing’ of mine, as I sense, is too frank and forthright, and may set fire to the future before it is read, and so I may perish from the earth without trace and end up as just a handful of ashes on the pyre of a humanity incinerated by its own wickedness.
Really, the end of the world is coming. The death of big things begins with the death of little things. In this case, true, we are dealing more with a case of suicide rather than death from natural causes. The suppression and humiliation of Avelum’s mini-empire, of his love-life, multi-faceted but still of one spirit and flesh, was accompanied by that of one of the largest states and harshest empires in the world. A rage to destroy little things weakened and shattered it — sometimes it sent him a lift operator, sometimes a local policeman to make his heart break in two, to give him a lump in his throat, even if he was at the time dining with his Dulcinea, or was lying, wrecked like a balloon pierced by a needle, in his Manon’s bed, even if these visits turned out to have their uses. Destruction was tracking him, following him like a shadow, as one love song puts it. It read his letters, it recorded his conversations on cassette tape and then endlessly repeated them in a KGB office or dungeon. It watched his every step, it took fingerprints from every object he touched, it raked through his underwear, probably to detect, and, there is no doubt about it, to destroy the bacilli of those feelings which had in the second half of the twentieth century found a refuge in Avelum’s heart and from there radiated all over the earth. But we were out of luck. You can’t diminish abstractions with bullets or poison, with toxins or armies of spies watching and listening. Otherwise, if it can’t even destroy an abstraction, it can’t call itself a superpower, a master of the universe, because it can’t forget that love happens to be an everlasting empire which people freely, voluntarily, have let, still let, and will always let themselves be enslaved by, as long as humanity continues to exist. But by nature I’m more of a lyricist than a politician. The other point about me is, in my opinion, that what was bound to happen didn’t happen, if we didn’t make it happen. So I have chosen to put on paper Avelum’s experiences, his love-life — in fact, his whole life —, rather than describe the forces that move our epoch, which is more than I can conceive of, let alone carry out. I shall tell everything, and not hold anything back, if only because our sincere confession may lead someone else, perhaps my good friend, my reader, who peruses this Book, to work out whether we are doomed or saved, whether we deserve to be doomed, whether our salvation was inevitable if we are saved.
