THE CITY IN SNOW
The City in Snow, is a collection of five stories that deal with Georgia’s recent past from different points of view. The author draws on his experience of reporting from crisis-torn areas and crafts it into literary form. In the first one, The Killer, the author narrates the lives and fights of Georgian soldiers and partisans during and after the war in Abkhazia. Real stories vividly show the impact of the war on common people – Georgians and Abkhazians; people who used to share the same land before the war and who were for centuries linked by a common homeland and close relations. The title story-The City in Snow-is about the love of a young boy and a girl, who, despite the dark cold days of the 1990s, are warmed by passion that leaves its imprint forever on their lives. The protagonist of I Had a Dream is a blind man. There are a many blind people around us but we hardly notice them. We give them a helping hand only out of a feeling of duty. The writer describes the feelings of a human being who cannot see daylight. In the story The Evening the author recalls his school years, the multi-ethnic Tbilisi of Soviet times and his friends, most of whom are no more. The fifth story, Musakala, tells the story of Georgian soldiers sent to Afghanistan on a NATO mission. The collection was short listed for Literary Award SABA 2014 in the category of the Best Prose.
‘The narrative technique can be classified as cinematic: from the first page to the last it has the constant inner tension, the excitement and the suspense of an action film as one ordeal follows another. The text of The Killer is so rhythmic and the reader’s involvement in the actions described is so deep, that you read it at one sitting, despite the grave nature of the subject matter.’
Sophio Tsulaia, literary critic, Literaturuli Gazeti
EXTRACT
Translated into English by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field
THE KILLER
Only one sentence awaits all us - death - Joseph Brodsky
God wrote my grief
On my sword
I killed my sworn brother,
I used a sword on my brother
They chase me to kill me
They put the trap for me on the road - Folk song
The sea was calm. It stretched far away to the horizon and cautiously touched the shore with a swishing sound. It glimmered calmly under the open, blue, deep and alien sky. A huge cluster of clouds sailed on the clear sky like a space shuttle, reflected in the swelling sea.
He was swimming in warm, slightly ruffled waves. Then he dived, opened his eyes and saw the white rays of the sun, fragmented, descending into the greenish, yellowish and dark sea water. It was making its way to the bottom of the sea.
And he immediately felt how something long, and thin as a thread, pierced him under his left shoulder blade. Once, twice and a third time and the sun fell and spread its white rays at lightning speed across the sea and it struck for the fourth time under his shoulder blade. His heart stopped. ‘Oh, I’m dying,’ he thought and started to sink down to the bottom of the white, illuminated, unpleasantly white sea, like a white harpooned shark. He tried to come back up to the surface. ‘No, I can’t. Oh, I am dying!’ he thought a second time and began to panic frantically. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t even move his arm. ‘I’ve died, you mother fucker, I’ve died!’... His whole body writhed, he moved his shoulders and immediately an unbearable pain went through his entire body like fire. He had never been afraid of pain, but he certainly didn’t want to die, especially in a thick, sticky, treacherous white sea, which had stuck a needle in his back, under his left shoulder blade. ‘You mother fucker,’ he said to the pain, to the whiteness, which was strangely illuminated from inside, and to the treacherous sea and to his own pierced heart. He struggled again, then paddled with his legs too.
The surface of the sea was visible far above. It was a long way away, but it was there. It was definitely there. He started moving slowly and after a while he leaped out of the sea, shook his head and immediately his wide-open eyes, crazy with terror, encountered the hot sun.
He swam towards the shore. He swam through the thick white sea and he couldn’t feel his heart any more. The shore was black and it wasn’t expecting anyone... (See PDF)
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