Somewhere East of Life

‘It’s clear we’ve met before. Because of the theft – I just don’t remember you.’

‘Let me remind you.’ She was wearing nothing under the dress. It fell open like a chest of drawers spilling out its goodies.

‘Does this look familiar?’

Her pubic hair had been shaved off.

She insisted on checking his anti-AIDS status. The indicator on his watch showed green. She showed her indicator, also reading Safe. It was OK. They went briskly through into the bedroom. She led the way. Burnell followed, admiring the jaunty buttocks, smooth as machine parts.

He had always liked the Germans, not least because his father hated them. The neatness of German towns, where modernity sat comfortably with antiquity, had been achieved nowhere else in Europe. In the same way, a Teutonic drive towards success – success in all things – was moderated by an everyday courtesy. Earnestness was similarly moderated by a sense of humour. He found the Germans honest; or at least they retained a respect for honesty. They were good on respect. Wholeheartedness attracted him, perhaps because he had never possessed the quality: it formed an element in the life here which excited him, an intense secret eroticism buried under the surface of daily existence which foreigners rarely saw: an eroticism which differed from the flashiness of Italian, the polish of French, the bounciness of Scandinavian, and the salaciousness of English eroticism, in that particular culinary quality, Teutonic wholeheartedness. He understood well that national wholeheartedness had led Germany into disastrous follies in the past, just as it had led to leadership in Europe in the present; still he found that wholeheartedness admirable: not only in economic life, but in bed. He paid her before undressing.

German women brought to lovemaking the same kind of homely expertise they once brought to breadmaking, the sleeves of their blouses metaphorically rolled up, their hair piled out of the way, the smells of a warm hearth in the air, flour spreading up to their armpits, the dough kneaded into required shape under those dimpled practised hands.

After ninety minutes and three orgasms, Burnell was relaxed and happy.

As the woman was leaving, he said, perhaps trying to restore his reputation in her fringed eyes, ‘I won’t be here next week. I’m going to Georgia.’

‘I too shall visit the USA one day.’

The bruiser was waiting for her in the corridor.

7

‘The Dead One’

The high-wing Yak 40 laboured towards the landing-strip like an aged pterosaur, fighting against a headwind which poured through the mountains. Below the snowline, the landscape was a faded green, patched here and there with livelier colour. It rose up to embrace the light aircraft. A river glinted, hastening down a valley, and was lost to view.

The airstrip was laid out on a plateau. The plateau was dominated by cliffs above and below, set in an extreme landscape, shiftless, unthriving, lying under puffs of cloud. This was a territory of religion, ideology, blood-letting, a land forever fought over, passionately disputed.

The Yak circled, coming in again, lower, still rocking, then into calmer air under the great slopes. Now buildings could be made out below, in particular a circular structure of some kind, with a cluster of vehicles round it like ticks round a wart. The plane burst through another puff of cloud, unexpectedly low, and tore it to shreds. Someone was firing at the craft. A way of saying Welcome to Transcaucasia.

The pilot shouted something to his two passengers which Colonel Irving interpreted. ‘We’re going down. As if we hadn’t guessed. He says to hold on. As if we weren’t.’

Then the twin-engine was no longer the aerial creature which had swanned over mountains, but a kind of mad car, bumping over grit. Burnell and Irving fought against the deceleration. The plane rolled to a halt.

A vehicle was jolting towards them as Burnell and Irving climbed down. Behind the Jeep came a truck. Two men jumped from the truck. They ran towards the plane, which carried supplies from Tbilisi, medical supplies, an intensive-care unit, flour, and sugar. All these items were more important to the fighters on the ground than Burnell or Irving.

Everyone moved at the double. Burnell and his companion, packs shouldered, were bundled into the Jeep, which made off at full speed. Above the roar of its engine, the crump of mortar shells could be heard.

The Jeep banged its way towards the building Burnell had seen from the air. It stood ruddy against a smear of shattered limestone hills in the distance. It was, or had been, a mosque, the minaret of which had been destroyed: only a stump remained. The mosque itself was a simple cube, capped by a dome resting on pendentives. Its open-arched porch supported three minor domes. Tiles on the main dome were missing.

Burnell knew from his WACH briefing that Ossetian occupation of this Georgian territory had endured for some while, until the hostility of their Christian neighbours, together with climatic changes, had forced the Muslim Ossetians to seek more hospitable territory to the north. Like the Balkans, Transcaucasia was a patchwork of conflicting ways of life.

A cluster of men, wearing a variety of uniforms, stood under the domed porch. All were armed. They watched alertly as Burnell and James Irving climbed from the Jeep and approached. One of the men took a step forward in order to detach himself from the others.

Burnell’s senses were so roused, by the drinking the previous night in Tbilisi, by the flight over the Caucasus, and by the exhilaration of finding himself in this divided land, that he took in the leader at a gulp. This man, right down to his swagger, was as picturesque as anyone could have wished, his khaki greatcoat being draped about with pistols, magazines, and the traditional Kalashnikov. With his boots and sheepskin hat he made a familiar figure, who appeared regularly on TV news bulletins. This was the rebel, taking advantage of the upheavals in Nagorny-Karabakh, who fought to establish his own breakaway state. He was all the more real to Burnell because the latter had seen him on television.

The leader looked mountainous. It was only later, seeing him less showily equipped, that Burnell realized he was no taller than average.

He gave his visitors a nod and a cold eye.

‘You’re Lazar Kaginovich?’ Irving enquired in his deep voice.

The other drew himself up. ‘I am Captain Lazar Kaginovich. Commander of Armies of the West Georgian Republican Forces.’ His English was accented but fluent. ‘You are of course the brave American Commander Irving, once an astronaut to the Moon. You are welcome in West Georgia.’

‘It’s just James Irving now.’

Kaginovich smiled by the sly expedient of raising his moustached upper lip. His expression did not change as Irving introduced Burnell.

‘Dr Roy Burnell, eh? We received a signal regarding you. But you are not a doctor of medicine.’

‘That’s correct. My subject is ecclesiastical architecture.’

‘There is a war going on and you come to regard a church …’ Kaginovich shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, that’s understood. We make concessions in time of war. To receive EU aid – to have Commander Irving – we must accept also ecclesiastical architects. Come with me.’ The words provoked his sneer.

A frozen look about Kaginovich made him a century older than his real years. He had yet to reach thirty. Already experience had etched itself on his brow and under his eyes.

The men in the porch gave way for the newcomers, while scrutinizing them mistrustfully. These were Kaginovich’s officers. One, a large man with sandy hair, gave an affable nod in Burnell’s direction. After a suspicious glance, the others returned to gazing across the airstrip, where the Yak’s cargo was being unloaded into the lorry. A distant mortar was still pounding, apparently to little effect.

Kaginovich walked with a slight limp, clapping his right hand to his thigh. Irving followed, with Burnell close behind, humping his gear over one shoulder. The old mosque had been wrenched from its original sacred purpose; it now housed soldiers, animals, and ammunition. A racket of lowbrow music issued from a radio.

The air was greasy with the stink of men, their cooking, their piss, and their mules. A number of West Georgian soldiers lay about on blankets, smoking, indolently watching smoke rise from a fire to cobwebby beams far above their heads. Their weapons and boots lay beside them. In one corner, mules and donkeys were tethered. The mules, black and long-eared, mutiny always in mind, shook their long heads over the backs of the donkeys.

An armoury of weapons, including a small field gun, bombs, and ammunition boxes, was piled carelessly near the fire, on which a cook was stirring a dixie.

Sunlight slanted in from above, rendered cold and fishy-looking by dirty windows. It was a scene more from the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. The end of the Cold War, signalling an uprising of nationalisms and ethnic quarrels, had set the map back to an 1899 disposition.

Tokens of war – of the continuing fragmentation of what had been until little more than fifteen years ago the Soviet Union – were everywhere. A shell hole through the front wall of the mosque had been plugged with sacking. Much of the interior was blackened by fire. Mural quotations from the Koran had been defaced. Wounded men lay on stretchers, tended by a male nurse. The desk to which Lazar Kaginovich strode was piled with papers held down by a clip of grenades.

Burnell thought of an analysis of the woes of the world, heard from a woman’s lips. Had those lips been Stephanie’s? He could not remember. But he remembered the terms. Women had risen up to assert themselves after centuries of oppression. Pride injured by this challenge, men had turned to an ancient proof of manhood, war. An alluring analysis but incorrect: the regions where women remained oppressed, without security or suffrage, were among those most ready to take up arms.

But to accept the aggressive nature of men, and the destructive nature of their creeds, was hardly a diagnosis, Burnell reflected, looking about him with excitement.

Kaginovich threw himself down behind his desk. He gestured to his two visitors to draw up stools. He shouted for the radio to be switched off.

‘I welcome you, Commander Irving. We of course know of your heroic past. We are honoured you have joined the West Georgian Republic’s struggle for independence, and freedom against its oppressors.’ His English contained rich aspirates in the Russian manner. He ignored Burnell.

Irving’s relaxed attitude to life had been demonstrated on the flight from Tbilisi.

Speaking in his easy way, he said, ‘Captain Kaginovich, as you are aware, I am merely on a peace-keeping mission instigated by the EU Security Council. I have nothing to do with the forces of General Stalinbrass, or with the UN blue berets, who were drawn into this struggle when their convoy was ambushed by Azeri forces near Signakhi.’

‘Those Azeris – they’re rebels, murderers, ethnic cleansers!’ Kaginovich said.

‘I’m a fact-finder, Captain. My presence here is designed to work toward a truce between you and your present enemies, so that proper discussions can take place and –’

‘None of discussions! Not until we have regained our stolen territories from here to the sea.’

Irving continued unperturbed. ‘– in Borzhomi, or elsewhere to be agreed. To this end, the EU Security Council will deliver at least a percentage of the aid requested. Dr Burnell and I have flown in with the first instalment.’ From inside his military parka he drew a list of the supplies and handed it across the desk. ‘No arms there, of course.’