Prose of the Mountains

The three stories excerpted here indicate the wide spectrum of Qazbegi’s interests. “Notes of a Shepherd” (1883) chronicles the writer’s decision to live as a mountaineer for seven years. “Eliso” (1882) chronicles the perilous deportation of Chechens to Ottoman lands, and anticipates Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat (1912) through its sympathy for the Chechens’ plight. The excerpt from the novella-length “Khevis Beri Gocha” (1884) displays the author’s ability to move backwards in time, as he evokes the famous Holy Trinity church that still stands atop Mt. Qazbegi, one of Georgia’s most spectacular mountains.

The excerpts published here are from the newly released collection of Aleksandre Qazbegi’s stories, The Prose of the Mountains, translated from the Georgian by Rebecca Gould and published by Central European University Press. 

Memoirs of a Shepherd
{excerpt}

In 18— I decided to become a shepherd. I was prepared to traverse hills and fields in pursuit of this trade. I wanted to know the lives of the people, to experience from within the pleasures and fears suffusing their lives. Being a mountaineer, I had a few sheep already. I had received other sheep in exchange for some plots of land. So I picked up a stick and my gun and became a shepherd.

Everyone regarded my decision as a joke. They said that the son of a respected nobleman had no business being a shepherd. But I had my reasons for the path I had chosen. My desire to become a shepherd was so powerful that I was deaf to all advice. I wanted to see these people. I wanted to experience their yearnings. I wanted to live their lives and to bear witness to the trials and tribulations that punctuate the lives of shepherds and that they kept hidden in their souls.

I achieved my goal. I came to know intimately those shepherds whom I was ready to give my life to live with. How I learned of their lives is the subject of the following pages.

It was still summer. The rams were wet and the ewes had not yet been milked. Two Moxeves appeared in the road who had never seen me before. From the way I was dressed, they couldn’t make out whether I was a simple shepherd or the son of a respected nobleman.

“May your flocks multiply!” they yelled once they were within hearing range.

“May God multiply your happiness!” I responded.

“Child, whose sheep are those?” they asked.

I answered with my last name, not mentioning that the name belonged to me as well as to the owner of the sheep.

“Well, I’ll be damned, they really do bear that mark. No one else has a seal like that,” the first Moxeve said and then asked, “Who is your father?”

“I am Arakhvetili, my friends,” I answered in the Mtiuleti dialect. “Burlian Iakobani is my father.”

“Are you a hired worker or do you share these sheep with other shepherds?” they asked.

“I share these sheep, my friends,” I answered.

The Moxeves stood by my side and helped me call the sheep back from their pasture.

“What is your name, child?”

“Mamuka, my friends.”

“Does the son of a lord really run with the sheep?”

“Yes, he does indeed run with the sheep, by the grace of Lomisi,” I answered.

“So now lords run around in the fields?” they asked in surprised unison.

“Yes, indeed,” I said.

“By God, that’s odd!”

“Why do you say that?” I asked. My heart began to palpitate and I pricked up my ears.

“You see nothing strange in the son of a lord chasing after sheep?” They waved their hands.

“What’s so strange about that?” I asked. “I have sheep and I prefer to pasture them by myself.”

“Strange?” The first speaker said. “The son of a lord of Xevi and a simple shepherd at the same time? You don’t see anything strange about that?”

“Your ancestors had sheep, too,” answered the second Moxeve. “They didn’t look after them on their own, thank God! But they would never think of being shepherds themselves, thank God.”

“Just look how low we have sunk in this corrupt age!” the first Moxeve said.

“Things have changed since then,” I said, attempting to justify myself.

“Whether or not that’s true, you must be good-for-nothing. If you hadn’t concocted this grand scheme of becoming a shepherd, then you could have become the governor of Kvesh.”

These words pained me so much that I couldn’t continue speaking. The sheep were running in circles around me, anxious for grazing. I took them to the mountain where they ran back and forth; it was still too early in the day for milking. The strangers bid me farewell and left me alone, newly saddened by society’s judgment against me and absorbed in my thoughts.

The mist lifted and fresh dew seeped from the sky. I put on my shawl and hat and stood in front of my sheep to keep track of those who were ahead of the rest. They were running on an empty stomach and I didn’t want them to lose their appetite. Not much time passed before I noticed two bearded men in formal clothing making their way toward me. I stared at them in surprise; if they were merely travelers, then they should have been approaching from the opposite direction.

My dog, Basara, rushed toward them with a bark. They took hold of their sticks, but I called to him to stay calm. Basara wagged his tail and ran back toward me. The strangers smiled and mumbled in broken Russian: “Dog, dog. No bite.”

“No bite,” I answered in equally broken Russian.

“Sheep, sheep,” one of the foreigners began. He couldn’t finish his sentence in Russian, so he turned to his companion and asked in French: “How do I ask, ‘Where is wool sold?’”

“I don’t know either,” the second companion answered in French.

They continued talking about wool and expressed surprise that such a large flock of sheep could be housed in the mountains. They started musing on how much wool I sold and how many sacks of wool I could collect.

I understood everything they said because I knew French quite well. Unable to restrain myself any longer, I interrupted: “There are many sheep in the mountains! People almost live with sheep, we have so many. Even Armenian merchants come here to buy our wool.”

Imagine their shock, when in those strange, wild mountains, inhabited, so the foreigners imagined, only by barbarians who didn’t know how to count past ten, all of a sudden a simple shepherd appeared who not only could understand French but could even speak the language fluently.

“What!” They exclaimed together. “You speak French?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Amazing! Where did you study French?”

I was in the mood to enjoy myself. So I answered, “All shepherds in this region speak French. I’ve worked in other places, and so my French is rusty, but, as for the other shepherds, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish their French from the French of a native speaker.”

“Amazing! This is a curious business!” they said to each other. “We thought you were barbarians!”

We talked for a while longer, until they grew tired. I became bored by their nonsense. They asked me for directions to Qazbegi station, where they intended to spend the night. Before leaving, they asked me to tell them about the lives, customs, and character of the Georgian people. At last, they asked me: “Have you heard of England and France?”

“Yes,” I answered, nodding my head.

“He is from France and I am from England,” one of them said to me and added, “We will write in our books everything you have told us when we return to our countries, then everyone will read these books. Come home with us. We will give you money.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I will go home with you.”

The Frenchman slipped his hand into his pocket, took out some rubles and stretched out his hand, beckoning me to take them. “Keep this money until this evening,” he said. “Tonight we will give you even more.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning red with embarrassment. “I’ll meet you tonight and you can give all the money to me then.”

“Take the money, don’t be shy.”

“I’ll take it this evening, sir.”

“As you wish, then. Let it be this evening,” he answered. The foreigners bid me farewell, and I directed my sheep toward my village and then sent them to pasture.

A fellow shepherd came down to help me that evening. He had returned from the mountain on which he had nourished a ewe back to the milking stage. A young boy accompanied him, to help us guard the sheep.

“Come in peace,” I greeted them as they arrived.

“May God grant you peace,” they answered.

“How are your sheep?” I asked them.

“Not bad. I bring my lambs every day to Qirvan and they play there. What else can I tell you? They’re well-fed and satisfied.”

“How are the lands for pasturing?”

“There’s not much to say. My cucumbers are round—” here my friend broke off. “But I came to see you on other business,” he resumed. “The Mistress asked me to tell you to come down from the mountains for a few minutes. Guests have come to see you.”

“Who are they?”

“How should I know who they are? They came from the city. Some kind of officers, I think.”

“Are there women with them?”

“Yes, there are women.”

“Then I’ll go, but I’m counting on you. Pay attention to the sheep. Don’t let any of them get away.”

“Don’t be afraid. Nothing bad will happen to them.”

I said goodbye and petted my loyal dog, who had grown so accustomed to my sheep that he couldn’t stand being separated from them, and set off for home.

It was a splendid moonlit evening. My guests were coming out of the garden, drinking their tea. From their joyful laughter and manner of speaking I deduced that they must have been enjoying themselves. I started walking in their direction. After a few steps, I noticed a relative of mine among the group whom I had not seen for ages. I hurried to meet him. The old man accompanying him happened to be one of my father’s closest friends. I had intended to change my clothes before greeting him, but the guests caught sight of me and called to me to come over to them. I asked their pardon for my dirty clothes and went to see them. I felt quite awkward to have my relative see me dressed like this. But imagine my surprise when, as soon as I arrived, the old man greeted me with the following words:

“Lord almighty! Look at this child of the lord of this mountain! For shame!”

I stood frozen with my hand outstretched to shake the hand of the relative I had not seen in so many years, while the old man simply stared at me with stupefaction. My young relations stood to the side and chuckled to themselves.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Don’t you have a conscience?” the angry old man asked me.

“Why are you attacking me, my good man?” I barely managed to articulate. “What crime have I committed?”

“How can you even ask such a question?” The old man yelled at me. “Young man, did your father raise you to be a shepherd? Did he waste all his savings on your education so you would turn out like this? If all you wanted was to live like a shepherd, you son of a bitch, then why did you go to Russia? Why did you waste so much money on your education? I could have given you to my own shepherd. He could have taught you how to be a shepherd better than anyone else!”

“My father lived as he pleased, and I intend to live according to my wishes as well,” I said. My insides were on fire.

“He went to the people. He wanted to experience the lives of the low classes, the prince!” said one of the young officers, smiling.[The speakers are referencing the activities that were associated with the narodniki, a group of Russian intellectuals who practiced a philosophy of going back to “the people [narod].” Georgia had its own version of the narodniki, called the xalxosnebi, but Qazbegi was not among them.]

“Whether I want to live like the people or not is none of your business!” I yelled. “But I will tell you one thing. I’ll take being a shepherd any day over shooting the breeze like you. At least shepherds do something useful.”

I turned and set off toward the house. When I reached my room I heard the enraged old man shout some nonsensical phrase and the young people laughing at his words. Then the old man cried: “Why do you want to get close to the people? What is the point? You say that today’s generation is useless and good for nothing. It will never create anything worthwhile.”

The officer was outraged by this idea and interrupted the old man’s speech: “What on earth is the meaning of this? Why do you try to force everyone to think like you? Our relative only became a shepherd because he wanted to show off. Surely, not everyone is as silly as he is!”

“There’s nothing special about being a shepherd. What do I have to show off?”

Those were the last words I ever heard from my guests. I shut the door and their voices vanished from my consciousness. On the one hand, they blamed me because I refused the silver-lined path that had been chiseled out for me before my birth. I was to blame for not pursuing the glory and the rank that would cast honor on their name. On the other hand, they berated me because, instead of incessantly lamenting the meaninglessness of my life and the parasitism of my class, I took up a challenging profession that actually had fulfilled a useful purpose. Among the shepherds, I was plagued by their distrust, because those sincere people, whom I strove with all my heart to befriend, couldn’t imagine a man from the aristocracy who didn’t want to rob them, and instead dreamed of working with them in fraternity and friendship.

Such was the debut of my career as a shepherd on the stage of life. I passed seven years of my life pursuing this craft. In the following pages you, dear reader, will see what I saw, felt, and understood during these seven years.

Eliso
{excerpt}

Near Vladikavkaz, on a low-lying meadow, a group of carts crammed with furniture stood in a circle, guarded by Russian troops. Fires kindled inside the circle, boiling the common meal for the night. Women prepared food, while old men sat on logs, smoking their tobacco pipes silently. Their nostalgic faces created a dreamy picture against the fire’s dimming light. Young people stood to the side, awaiting an imminent, unknown disaster.

It was a perfect, warm night, one of those evenings when a person feels blessed to be alive, when pleasure surges through every coil of every vein. Yet a silence hung in the air like a mysterious grief that breaks speech and kills sound before it is born. From time to time, the breathing of those gathered inside the circle was cut short; they stood gasping, immersed in a silence barren of life, like that of the graveyard. The Chechens, vigorous and joyful by nature, were silent and dull today, full of fear like the air before a storm, on the verge of thunder.

Why did these people, so full of life, become so silent? What made their words stick in their craw? What kind of misfortune had struck to make those, who only a few years before would have carelessly greeted the worst of tragedies, now timid and mute?

When the night first fell, faint words could be heard before they dissipated in the air. Soon, however, even those words ceased and were followed by complete silence. The hum of the chianuri suddenly broke this peace, recalling to its listeners the kingdom of the dead. The lonely melody was followed by an incessant buzzing sound. My God, what a voice it was! This complaint poured from the heart’s depths, burning those who sang and everyone who listened to them. A gentle breeze carried the sound far away, across the meadow, toward every tree, bush, and blade of grass. Everything it touched trembled, as though nature was conscious for the first time of her power.

The droning of one man became a general drone, and the entire meadow was soon covered with plaintive cries and lamentations of the multitudes. Torn from the mouth, this common voice was an inarticulate rendition of the Chechens’ pain. Those who heard it suffered and grieved, but were powerless to break free from its spell.

It was the last farewell of a dying child, saying goodbye forever to his beloved mother. It was as though a ruthless, merciless, and unjust power was taking the child away before his time, before he had a chance to caress his mother. It was the sob of an unhappy mother for her firstborn child, followed by the lamentation of a person whose beloved had died.

This groaning, moaning, and lamentation was all the more bitter because it wasn’t only a single person’s lamentation over his own misfortune, weeping for somebody forever lost. The trials and tribulations of everyone were compressed in this lament; their blood vessels vibrated as one. Here, a single moan contained the tragedy of an entire people.

The Chechens were saying goodbye to the homeland they had spent their lives fighting for. No father had spared his child, no wife her husband, in order to nurture this land, and now after so many struggles, so many sorrows, so many deaths in vain, they were saying goodbye.

“Where are you, God?” they cried, their eyes directed toward the sky. Receiving no answer, their eyes returned to the earth.

In every corner of these places, their friends had spilled their blood. The Chechens remembered the courage of their long-gone friends as they bid their homeland goodbye. With every place they revisited and every step they took, memories of the past grew stronger. Sorrowful pictures scorched their hearts like a branding iron.

Sometimes words have no place in the expression of grief, and yet the wordless lamentations of a conquered people say more than words garnished a thousand different ways. Any person who has never heard the Chechens’ lament has never heard the sound of grief.

What was the reason for their deportation, what crime had they committed, that others would make them suffer so, and punish them with such brutality?

They had done nothing wrong. The Chechens were suffering because there were no limits to the greed of Chechnya’s new colonial administration. To possess all of the Chechens’ lands, this new administration had to have Chechnya without Chechens. To make themselves rich, they needed to send the rightful inhabitants of Chechnya’s territory into exile. Deporting the Chechens was the most effective means of achieving this goal.

Khevis Beri Gocha
{excerpt}

The day was beginning to break. A thick layer of fog floated over the Tergi River, covering the entire area and the village. In several places, the mountain tips ripped through the mist; they seemed to be standing in the air without support from below. The sun’s rays penetrated the blue sky and painted it red. The stars felt the approach of day and their weak twinkling became even dimmer. Old Elbrus gazed down below with pride at Sameba, a mountain named after the ancient Church of the Holy Trinity, which had been erected on its slope and preserved throughout many centuries. The edifice that remained, surrounded by green flowers, offered but a dim memory of the glorious days of long ago. Beneath the church stood the same fog, seeking with its dense power to liberate the past from its earthly chains.

From the heights of Sameba, the ground below seemed bathed in beauty. The world was deep asleep and filled with a silent sadness. The usually restless wind held its breath, no longer caressing the leaves. Only on rare occasions would rocks dislodged by startled mountain goats roll down the slopes and break the silence that filled the air. The avalanche of falling rocks united with the waterfall’s melody as it cascaded down the mountains, singing its lullaby to sleeping nature.

All of a sudden, a high-pitched sound interrupted this idyllic scene. A restless bird’s song filled the air for several minutes, as she felt the approach of dawn or perhaps detected the sleeping shadow of her male companion.

The sun’s flames painted Mount Elbrus a fiery red, its rays glistening on the surface of the crystal snow like a golden tiara. A partridge called on his sweetheart to join in the celebration; he didn’t want to experience nature’s bliss alone. The sweet rebirth of nature was not merely a matter of sound. Mountain goats, worn out by long nights of roaming the forest and mountaintops, struggled to move forward, as the white, glistening snow called upon nature to play. The pleasant scents stirred the goats to dizziness and enveloped them in a bliss they could only free themselves from by shaking their heads.

Not far away, in the forest, a blackbird chirped in ecstasy over nature’s bliss. A bell resounded from somewhere in the church. A mild breeze scattered the sound through the mountains. The bell resounded again, then another time. Finally, it turned into a steady appeal. Apparently, the guards of the temple had awoken and were calling the villagers to assemble.

The morning breeze blew softly, and, with the help of the sun’s rays, shook and stirred the mist, which, like a lover caught unawares by the passage of time, disappeared at the approach of dawn and sought a peaceful refuge behind the mountains. The ravine appeared through the fog as the foamy, wild Tergi River flowed like a rabid beast along its spine. Everywhere, people were moving back and forth and the villages were coming to life. People gathered in groups at the entrance to every village. In the middle of every group, at the center of every village, stood a flag, hoisted high, calmly swaying in the breeze.