Real Life

I had ice cream in both hands and a doll almost my size tucked in my arm. I was standing there waiting in a line with grandma. When would it be our turn?! I looked suspiciously at the person who was looking at no one. He was standing all in green next to something big, something I did not know. There were a lot of people there. I asked grandma to buy me more ice cream, but grandma said with an unusual voice that we were in a hurry and needed to go home…

I can see Sataanjo Mountain from the balcony of my house and Enguri gorge from the balcony at my work… I don’t like ice cream since that day… I especially hate its smell… When I first went on a meeting with them, I thought I would return with them… And again I remembered ice cream… If not all of this, I would probably like ice cream as every other child... I came to hate only ice cream, while others came to hate almost everything… I had a house, while others did not… I had Dora, my dog, waiting for me at home after school, while they did not.

“We had a big fig tree in our yard. The first time I felt emptiness was when I saw the tree fallen down together with my mom. What I found out afterwards was that there was no house either.” Do you know how many times I wished I shared the faith of these people so that I could also carry this load? Optimism is probably lost when there is a despair, but I still keep going… I don’t know how to swim, but water is my passion… I will always remember august of 2008 and the thought that everything is over and it is over only for us...

However, reality is so obscure that none of us wants to remember it. But it is probably necessary to talk about pain too… What is the name of this environment where we on both sides have grown at different times?! Is the cause of all this really so close to each of us?! Where have we lost each other? Why are we looking for each other so far away?! It has been a third year that I have been rearing “them” for myself, but now I’m confused, I have lost my way, and I fear more than I have ever feared. This is more than the fear that creeps in when the lightning strikes… “Mom, are they coming?!” Mom will pat me on the cheek and tell me – “no”… This is not chauvinism, this is not Nazism, neither it is nationalism… I want mine together with them… But damn it! They don’t fit together… I have started to care for them too!

Where do we draw the line?

I draw it where the fig roots rotted, where I took onion with my tiny hands from the snow and ate it, where I let my calf go to pasture, but it never came back…

And they? They draw it in their father’s eyes, where they read every single day: “why?”… Under the chair at the station, at Gumisda, at Achadara…

I had my last ice cream that grandma had bought me in Sukhumi… We were in a hurry because it was August 14, 1992 in Georgia… Later I learned that the man in the green was a soldier, while the “thing” that he was standing by was a tank… And I was five…

We were very little…

And now?!

Zugdidi

March, 2009, Anno Domini