Tara Isabella Burton<\/p>\n
We had not died. We had made it deep into Khevsureti without tumbling off the pass or being shot by itinerant Chechens; the van had rolled precariously down the mountain until we thought to secure it with a stray log, and Misha, beleaguered but well-paid, had escorted us to the summit of a nearby cliff and pointed out the crypts with one of the three remaining fingers on his right hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cBones.\u201d<\/p>\n
He returned to the van to finish his cigarette. The cliffs curved and protruded outwards like the spines of dragons; the air smelled like rain.<\/p>\n
Felix leaped upon the tombs and traipsed from one to the other with all the reverence of a mountain goat, clicking his camera at the skeletons.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t do that,\u201d Leah placed her hands against the tomb and closed her eyes. \u201cThere are spirits here.\u201d She began to hum softly and drag her skirts into the mud. \u201cDo you know what they used to do?\u201d She did not wait for my reply. \u201cIf they had cholera, back in the old days. Or the plague. They\u2019d just come out here to die.\u201d She peered into the crypt and blew the dust off the bones. \u201cJust wait. So as not to infect the others. I think that\u2019s beautiful. To come here <\/em>to die.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf I did have to die,\u201d I said. \u201cI suspect this is the place I\u2019d do it.\u201d The waterfall had grown black with shale and the air vibrated with mosquitoes.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look long enough,\u201d said Leah, \u201cthe green becomes black.\u201d She put her hand on my shoulders and I shivered but said nothing. \u201cWe should say a prayer or something?\u201d she said. \u201cWhich gods do the Khevsurs worship? That\u2019s the sort of thing you\u2019d know, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n I did.<\/p>\n Leah had declared herself a pagan over breakfast. She had squeezed my hand and told me that she felt the power of wood-nymphs and sky-goddesses wherever she went, and that the fresh rams\u2019 skulls she\u2019d spotted dotted all along the mountain path had brought her far closer to the brink of illumination than the perfunctory services she\u2019d attended in Tbilisi.<\/p>\n \u201cMy friend gave me a copy of your book,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought about reading it. But I\u2019m not very academic. I don\u2019t normally read anything with footnotes\u2014I\u2019m not clever enough.\u201d She smiled at me. \u201cAnd maybe it\u2019s better not to know. I like to make up my own gods.\u201d<\/p>\n It was a methodical study of pagan syncreticism in the Southern Caucasus; it was the only interesting thing I\u2019d ever done.<\/p>\n We looked out over the ravine. \u201cHow long was it, do you think?\u201d she asked me. \u201cUntil people found them.\u201d<\/p>\n Felix was tottering on the edge of the crypt, and the American girls had started shrieking and begging him to come down.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to fall, you know,\u201d said Felix. \u201cCan\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you know?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSpirits.\u201d <\/em>He grinned at Leah and hopped down to a lower ridge.<\/p>\n \u201cSpirits?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was in Djibouti. Met a witch-woman. This fucking nutter\u2014sorry, ma\u2019am\u201d (he turned to me) \u201cwho offered to tell my fortune. She told me I was going to die at sea. Be thrown overboard\u2014a proper ship\u2019s funeral.\u201d He kicked out his feet against the roof of the crypt. \u201cSo you see, I shan\u2019t die here. No matter what the danger.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course he was lying. The story had come to him the moment Leah had closed her eyes and gone into ecstasies at the sheer pagan possibility of the place. I knew it as soon as he had spoken, and when Leah had gone round the bend to pay her respect to the dust and the dead he shot me a sprightly and conspiratorial wink.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s beautiful,\u201d Leah considered, knotting the ferns.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is?\u201d He bounded past her and leaned neatly against the crypt until she looked up at him.<\/p>\n \u201cTo have a prophecy. I\u2019ve never had anything like that.\u201d Leah had tangled pink hair and wide unblinking eyes and narrow sparrow shoulders when she hunched forward, her face set against the wind and the oncoming darkness. \u201cDo you avoid ships, then?\u201d<\/p>\n Felix laughed. \u201cGod, no. I take ships all the time. Sailed from Istanbul to Batumi to get here. Stopped at Trabzon. There was this terrible tornado, came awfully close to biting it\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The rest vanished on the wind. He strode out to the brook and Leah, entranced, followed close after him. They left me behind.<\/p>\n I was used to this. It happened to me often when I was traveling. For a few hours, for the duration of a train-journey or a marshrutka <\/em>ride, hours I cherished and folded away under my pillow, I could be trusted. My must-curtained skirts and uncombed hair gave off the impression of respectability.<\/p>\n On the drive up, Leah had confessed to me that at the age of sixteen she had once, unable to resist the morbidity of her curiosity and the cigarette-tinted terror of one enormous and empty New York night, stood on a chair and attempted to hang herself off the pipes in her bedroom. At the last moment she\u2019d gotten stuck, and so she\u2019d smashed a porcelain Virgin Mary she kept on her dress-top altar, and used the shards to cut herself down.<\/p>\n Even today, she said, she kept them in her pocket, in a velvet pouch she\u2019d picked up in Marrakesh. They kept her safe.<\/p>\n I told myself her story on the drive up the pass. She was twenty-five and had dyed her hair pink and ran slipshod over continents and never slept in the same bed for more than a month at a time. She carried an altar with her wherever she went\u2014a bag that smelled of patchouli, full of candles and incense and icons she\u2019d picked up on her travels. Her nightly ablutions on the grimy floor of the hostel bore little resemblance to any authentic pagan practice; I could not stand to correct her.<\/p>\n She was beautiful and she was vital and the vast cavernous expanse of her promise yawned out at her feet and threatened at every moment to swallow her up.<\/p>\n She had squeezed my hand and blushed when she spoke and pressed into my hand a part of her that would linger with me when she had gone.<\/p>\n It had happened before; it would happen again. The smell of patchouli lingered on my shawl and Felix had convinced her to traipse with him on the rooftops of tombs. Misha emitted an imperious grunt and we re-embarked and continued the journey to Shatili.<\/p>\n The American girls passed around the camera to show off their pictures; one of the Russians attempted an untranslatable boast; the Czech girl kept eating cucumbers out of her backpack, for Misha had thwarted all of our attempts at procuring dinner.<\/p>\n I sat at the end of the table with my book, eating biscuits out of a paper bag, and knew that I had traveled as far as I would ever go with her. She was flirting with Felix, now, and I no longer mattered. Her ears were pink and my face was flushed and she did not look at me.<\/p>\n As we pulled up beneath the black and abandoned fortress at Shatili, the sun burnt out overhead and the first stars appeared motionless in the firmament. I returned to Legends and Histories of the Greater Caucasus<\/em> and tried to make notes in the margins.<\/p>\n We got off the bus.<\/p>\n \u201cTower,\u201d said Misha.<\/p>\n Leah looked up at it and rushed forth, her skirts trailing in the mud. \u201cSo we\u2019re here,\u201d she called out, and in infinitesimal ecstasy leaned her head against a patch of wildflowers and gaze out to where green had eclipsed the path. \u201cAre we really staying here?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Felix had decided to jog along the mountainside and leap onto the rooftops; Misha had long since stopped trying to keep him alive.<\/p>\n Leah closed her eyes. \u201cAt last.\u201d I stepped toward her, but she had already gone, following Felix\u2019s headlong pursuit of a firefly, scrambling after him and skinning her ankle when she fell.<\/p>\n Misha had uprooted a fern from the earth. \u201cSpecial.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSpecial?\u201d One of the American girls snapped a photograph.<\/p>\n \u201cMagic.\u201d<\/p>\n This caught Felix\u2019s attention. \u201cA magic flower?\u201d He jumped down from the tower and began to interfere. \u201cYou mean like salvia or something?\u201d He plucked a bit and chortled and pretended to chew a stalk. \u201cGo on, then\u2014let\u2019s see what it does.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe fern-flower.\u201d I knew something he did not; I made no effort to hide my satisfaction. \u201cIt\u2019s a popular legend in a number of former-USSR countries. Slavic, initially. You crush them and put them in someone\u2019s drink and they fall in desperate, violent, all-consuming love for the course of several hours. It\u2019s at the root of several of the happiest marriages. Not, of course, that I would know.\u201d<\/p>\n Leah smiled slightly; the others looked uncomfortable and said nothing, as people often did when faced with the fact of my spinsterhood. Only Felix laughed, spluttering into nonsense.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, well, when you\u2019re busy, you know\u2014no time for proper dating, anything like that. Got to speed up the process somehow?\u201d He made a clumsy attempt to nudge me in the ribs.<\/p>\n I told him I had no such idea.<\/p>\n Leah reached down and plucked one of the flowers. \u201cOf course there would <\/em>be a love-potion,\u201d she said. \u201cOut here.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you mean, out here?\u201d Felix was absent-mindedly scratching himself behind the ear.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, there\u2019s nothing else out here, is there?\u201d Leah knotted the flowers into a daisy-chain. \u201cWe\u2019re so far from home\u2014so far from everything<\/em>. Why shouldn\u2019t there be love-potions out here? There\u2019s no phone signal.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy not, indeed?\u201d I smiled my inscrutable maiden-aunt smile and did not elaborate further.<\/p>\n It was why I had come, after all; it was why we had all come, putting our lives into Misha\u2019s mutilated hands to spend the night in the writhing, empty Caucasus, where serpents bred and rams wandered and altars stained with blood and moonshine still dotted the mountainside.<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d Leah decided. \u201cIt\u2019s beautiful\u2014they must <\/em>work. It\u2019s the only way.\u201d She looked at me half-apologetically. \u201cDo they frighten you, Dr. Volk? Or do those things not work on you?\u201d<\/p>\n I had asked her to call me Rebecca. \u201cDoes what not work?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t you get bored of that sort of thing? If you\u2019re scurried up in a library somewhere writing down spells on index cards. Doesn\u2019t it ruin the mystique, a bit?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDoubt it!\u201d Felix interjected swiftly. \u201cI bet she knows every spell and potion by heart. I bet she could hex all of us, if she wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m an academic. We don\u2019t hex people. Even if we\u2019d very much like to.\u201d<\/p>\n They did not frighten me. Love-potions and rams\u2019 heads and empty chrismatic vodka-bottles were for those who needed them, for those who lived life soaked through by its storms. Leah\u2019s spirits and wood-nymphs and buzzing dryads did not touch me; I had catalogued them all. I knew their secrets.<\/p>\n Felix cocked his head at Leah. \u201cSo you\u2019re a pagan<\/em>?\u201d He took her in. \u201cThat\u2019s terribly interesting. Do you have naked bacchanals in the woods, things like that?\u201d<\/p>\n She laughed; she could not know he was mocking her. \u201cNo\u2014not at all. I only light candles…\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFood.\u201d Misha appeared in the doorway, beckoning us inside.<\/p>\n They left me alone in the starlight, knee-deep in the grass. The cliffs were black now, blacker than the towers, and the only sign of life against that vast emptiness was the clouding and unclouding of the moon. The river ran and the ferns rustled and I belonged to none of it, and so I stood and stared. Here I could stare out into the ravine until it became an abyss, and down the waterfalls to where they penetrated into the broken-down battlements of the earth, and when mountains had become valleys and the streams flowed into the sky, there would be little else to separate the living and the dead.<\/p>\n I pressed the fern-flowers between my fingertips until they turned black; I closed my eyes and felt the naked light of stars. I thought of her\u2014of the way she touched my hand and of the way she did not look at me, of the way she smiled when looking in any direction but mine, and of the things that made her smile, and of the old gods she carried in her rucksack, and of the familiar emptiness that would bring me to my knees when she was gone<\/p>\n But tonight, with my hands black and the petals wedged beneath my fingertips, with the touch of her fingers still seared into my palm, I was no longer divided from the kingdom of all living things, from the rocks that breathed out lizards and the grass that buzzed and hummed and the water that sang as it poured down.<\/p>\n I thought of Leah\u2019s mouth, breaking open into a smile when Felix teased her, when he offered her his arm, and thought of it as I crushed the petals between my palms. I thought of Felix\u2019s sweat and the smell of moonshine on his breath and his hand pushing at her neck and his fingers twining in her hair.<\/p>\n In the distance Misha had brought out the panduri <\/em>and had begun to play a strange and atonal melody; the night air slanted with sound.<\/p>\n I poured out Misha\u2019s cheap wine into two plastic cups. I crushed the flower into them both and then set them before me on a stone.<\/p>\n I imagined gorging myself, gulping and vomiting up love. I saw myself delirious, stained, pink-haired and overwhelmed and knotted to my own flesh. I saw myself, silvery in moonshine, biting the stains of my palms, licking the pulp from underneath my fingernails, spilling the wine onto my breasts and perfuming my hair. I could tear up my notes; I could devour her trust; I could light candles with her and roll, moss-shrouded, under the light of the moon.<\/p>\n But of course, those things didn\u2019t work on me.<\/p>\n I returned to the tower; I poured out the wine for the table and gave a toast in impeccable Khevsur dialect in honor of new friends and fellow travelers. I placed them down before Felix and Leah and waited.<\/p>\n I watched as her face flushed; I watched as his insouciant grin lost its despicable edge and became foolish and dogged and despairing. I watched as she leaned in and breathed in his words with the night air and parted her lips and rejoiced, dizzy and disquieted, that for the first time in her life she had at last been understood. He touched her hand and I felt it; she let her ankle rest against his and the sensation shivered up my spine. She whispered something in his ear and I heard it. I was there, between them. I was at her side and in the wine they drank. She was dizzy and he was reeling and the light from the fire filled the air with mist.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to make a toast!\u201d Leah was barely standing; she had no breath left. She leaned against the table and it threatened to buckle under her. \u201cNo\u2014it\u2019s my turn! It is!\u201d<\/p>\n One of the American girls tried to steady her; Leah pushed her away. \u201cIt\u2019s a toast\u2014it\u2019s a love toast. To towers…to the middle of nowhere\u2014it\u2019s so beautiful.\u201d She turned to Felix. \u201cIt is\u2014you understand, don\u2019t you? About this? About everything? Yes\u2014you said it yourself, about the prophecy…\u201d<\/p>\n He took her into his arms and kissed her; I burned with them. He pressed her against the stone walls and let his hands wander down her long skirts; he threaded his fingers into her hair and inhaled the breath from her lips.<\/p>\n The others made half-hearted cluckings about propriety; it did not stop them. Her fingers were unbuttoning his shirt; his hands squeezed bruises into her shoulders. The fire was crackling and the air smelled like wine and she had lost herself in him and in her ecstasy she made small mewing sounds of earthly joy.<\/p>\n One of the American girls turned to me. \u201cShouldn\u2019t you stop them?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s nothing to do with me,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n They had by now fallen onto the divan. His legs were tangled in her skirts; her hair had wound its way around his neck. The American girls tried to separate them. Leah pushed them away and Felix screamed various curses in languages he did not know. Misha was clutching at his bayonet and banging his misshapen fist upon the table.<\/p>\n They did not hear him. They were foolish and they were glorious; their lips were dark with black wine and their faces flushed with desire and I felt their joy course through me.<\/p>\n \u201cAt least wait until we\u2019re gone,\u201d I said, with infinite respectability.<\/p>\n The rest of us filed upstairs in defeat. I stood upon the landing and listened\u2014first to her joy and his murmurs and then the pulsing of her breath and the beginning of his groans.<\/p>\n They were drunk and shook through by love. Felix had stripped to the waist and pulled her chemise over her head; he kissed her breasts and whispered secrets into the side of her wrists. They did not notice me where I remained, silent upon the stair, party and privy and feeling with them the first thrust and the second bite and the final, shivering scream.<\/p>\n She lay in his arms, afterward, kissing his chest and staring out the window at the stars.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel safe here,\u201d she whispered. \u201cI don’t feel safe many places, but here…\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI’ve been waiting for this,\u201d he said. \u201cBeen all over, you know. Been to Djibouti. I was looking for something. But this is what I needed…\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy did you come here?\u201d She wrapped his arms more tightly around her breasts.<\/p>\n \u201cBeen everywhere else,\u201d he said. \u201cThings stop seeming new.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut this <\/em>is new?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s different.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDifferent how?\u201d She rolled over and looked at him, propped up upon her elbows, her eyes taking in the fine pale hair on his forearms, the victorious blush on his cheeks.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not bored,\u201d he said. It meant something.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s different for me too, you know.\u201d Her voice was hasty and breathless. \u201cI\u2019ve never done this before.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn a tower?\u201d<\/p>\n She swallowed. \u201cI\u2019ve been waiting for something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSomething like what?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYour story about the ships…that\u2019s when I knew. That it had to be like this. Out here. With the stars and the wine and the panduri <\/em>and the mountains all around us. Something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never done it in a tower…\u201d He was staring out the window, conscious only of the moon. \u201cOn a ship. I\u2019ve done that. And in a temple, once. And in an opera-house…\u201d He laughed quietly to himself. \u201cBut never in a tower. You\u2019re wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n I listened to them make love a second time. I learned that she wept and that he cried out and that when the astronomical enormity of the moment overwhelmed her she clung to him with drowning desperation and buried her head in his neck. Dawn crept through the holes in the tower and they spoke again:<\/p>\n \u201cWe should go to the Black Sea,\u201d she said. \u201cOn horseback. With falcons.\u201d<\/p>\n He stirred.<\/p>\n She whispered as she kissed his chest. \u201cI’ll take you to the Black Sea\u2014I\u2019ve always wanted to go. I have it written down in my diary, you know, from when I was little. Not little\u2014but young. That I wanted to fall in love and run off to the Black Sea.\u201d She pressed his fingers to her lips.<\/p>\n I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of her voice mingling with the echoes of the streams.<\/p>\n \u201cBut you\u2019re here now,\u201d she continued. \u201cI want to give you something.\u201d She turned and reached into the folds of her skirts and in the exhilarating flush of dawn I could see the naked curve of her breasts.<\/p>\n She pressed something into his hand.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s for good luck,\u201d she said. \u201cI’ve kept it with me my whole life\u2014since I was sixteen. It\u2019s a talisman. But don\u2019t take them out of the pouch\u2014the edges are sharp.\u201d<\/p>\n He sat up. His hair fell from his eyes and the sheet fell from his chest and in the morning light I saw that his lips were pale and that he no longer loved her.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t take this,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOf course you can\u2014I\u2019m giving it to you…\u201d Her mouth was black and parted; her eyes were wide and still glittered with tears.<\/p>\n \u201cNo\u2014I mean, I can\u2019t accept it. You\u2019re wonderful\u2014I mean, you really are wonderful, and this has <\/em>been<\/em> wonderful…\u201d He fumbled through a litany of excuses and could not settle on any one. \u201cI mean\u2014Georgian wine, awfully strong, you know. Not used to it. Had to go off alcohol for a bit\u2014antibiotics…something I picked up in Senegal.\u201d<\/p>\n She remained naked and unblinking before him.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want you to get the impression…\u201d<\/p>\n She waited motionlessly for him to finish.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t regret a lot of things,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I do regret this.\u201d<\/p>\n He could no longer remember what he had whispered, nor the feeling of her hair twined about his fingers, nor the overwhelming taste of that wine. I remembered everything.<\/p>\n He passed me on the stair.<\/p>\n She was naked and curled up before the fire. Her hair covered her breasts and she did not move but only rocked on her heels, her eyes still staring out to where there were no longer stars. Beneath the curve of her emaciated shoulders lay aches and bruises on the flesh which I had not touched, but which I had tasted; my arms ached and stung where they had not been bitten. For a night I had stood upon the stair and known all things; now I stood beside her, and wept with her, and felt the curious ecstasy that came upon me when I knew that my heart had been broken, and that there was no more to feel.<\/p>\n I put a blanket over her shoulders and asked if she was all right.<\/p>\n \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t understand,\u201d she said. She dressed swiftly and did not look at me.<\/p>\n I told her I did not.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had an adventure,\u201d she said, as she fastened her belt. Her voice was tin-hollow. \u201cI\u2019m going to go out for a while. Don\u2019t wake the others.\u201d<\/p>\n I gathered the velvet pouch from the floor and slipped it into my skirt-pocket. By the time I reached the threshold she was already at the bottom of the hill, running into the bosom of the mountain that embraced her, her skirts lost against the chromatic onslaught of that impossible, ever-darkening green.<\/p>\n We heated our breakfast on the fire, bleary-eyed, and the American girls gossiped when they were sure that Felix was not listening. By nightfall she had not returned.<\/p>\n When the storm first broke above us I dreamed that I saw her come to a breathless stop before the crypts. I saw her furiously uprooting flowers from the earth and praying to old stone gods and ram\u2019s heads. I saw her throwing out her arms against the thunder that shook the bones in their dwelling-places and the lightning bolts that forked down into the river like the tongues of snakes. I saw her, shaking as the mountain shook, wrapping her arms about her knees, curling into the stone, to wait.<\/p>\n It took them three days to find her.<\/p>\n Academic theologian by day, experimental theatre director by night, TARA ISABELLA BURTON<\/strong> lives between Oxford, England, where she\u2019s working on a doctorate in theology and 19th century French literature, and Tbilisi, Georgia, where she haggles for antique swords. Her work has previously appeared in\u00a0The Spectator, Literary Traveler, Gigantic Sequins<\/em>, and more. She is the winner of the 2012 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing. Her website is\u00a0http:\/\/www.taraisabellaburton.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tara Isabella Burton We had not died. We had made it deep into Khevsureti without tumbling off the pass or being shot by itinerant Chechens; the van had rolled precariously down the mountain until we thought to secure it with … Continue reading