Kaye curled up in the passenger seat of the whining little Fiat as Lado guided it along the alarming twists and turns of the Georgia Military Highway. Though sunburned and exhausted, she could not sleep. Her long legs twitched with every curve. At a piggish squeal of the nearly bald tires, she pushed her hands back through short-cut brown hair and yawned deliberately.
Lado sensed the silence had gone on too long. He glanced at Kaye with soft brown eyes in a finely wrinkled and sun-browned face, lifted his cigarette over the steering wheel, and jutted out his chin. ‘In shit is our salvation, yes?’ he asked.
Kaye smiled despite herself. ‘Please don’t try to cheer me up,’ she said.
Lado ignored that. ‘Good on us. Georgia has something to offer the world. We have great sewage.’ He rolled his r’s elegantly, and ‘sewage’ came out see-yu-edge.
‘Sewage,’ she murmured. ‘Seee-yu-age.’
‘I say it right?’ Lado asked.
‘Perfectly,’ Kaye said.
Lado Jakeli was chief scientist at the Eliava Phage Institute in Tbilisi, where they extracted phage – viruses that attack only bacteria – from local city and hospital sewage and farm waste, and from specimens gathered around the world. Now, the West, including Kaye, had come hat in hand to learn more from the Georgians about the curative properties of phage.
She had hit it off with the Eliava staff. After a week of conferences and lab tours, some of the younger scientists had invited her to accompany them to the rolling hills and brilliant green sheep fields at the base of Mount Kazbeg.
Things had changed so quickly. Just this morning, Lado had driven all the way from Tbilisi to their base camp near the old and solitary Gergeti Orthodox church. In an envelope he had carried a fax from UN Peacekeeping headquarters in Tbilisi, the capital.
Lado had downed a pot of coffee at the camp, then, ever the gentleman, and her sponsor besides, had offered to take her to Gordi, a small town seventy-five miles southwest of Kazbeg.
Kaye had had no choice. Unexpectedly, and at the worst possible time, her past had caught up with her.
The UN team had gone through entry records to find non-Georgian medical experts with a certain expertise. Hers was the only name that had come up: Kaye Lang, thirty-four, partner with her husband, Saul Madsen, in EcoBacter Research. In the early nineties, she had studied forensic medicine at the State University of New York with an eye to going into criminal investigation. She had changed her perspective within a year, switching to microbiology, with emphasis on genetic engineering; but she was the only foreigner in Georgia with even the slightest degree of training the UN needed.
Lado was driving her through some of the most beautiful countryside she had ever seen. In the shadows of the Central Caucasus they had passed terraced mountain fields, small stone farmhouses, stone silos and churches, small towns with wood and stone buildings, houses with friendly and beautifully carved porches opening onto narrow brick or cobble or dirt roads, towns dotted loosely on broad rumpled blankets of sheep- and goat-grazed meadow and thick forest.
Here, even the seemingly empty expanses had been swarmed over and fought for across the centuries, like every place she had seen in Western and now Eastern Europe. Sometimes she felt suffocated by the sheer closeness of her fellow humans, by the gap-toothed smiles of old men and women standing by the side of the road watching traffic come and go from new and unfamiliar worlds. Wrinkled friendly faces, gnarled hands waving at the little car.
All the young people were in the cities, leaving the old to tend the countryside, except in the mountain resorts. Georgia was planning to turn itself into a nation of resorts. Her economy was growing in double digits each year; her currency, the lari, was strengthening as well, and had long since replaced rubles; soon would replace Western dollars. They were opening oil pipelines from the Caspian to the Black Sea; and in the land where wine got its name, it was becoming a major export.
In the next few years, Georgia would export a new and very different wine: solutions of phage to heal a world losing the war against bacterial diseases.
The Fiat swung into the inside lane as they rounded a blind curve. Kaye swallowed hard but said nothing. Lado had been very solicitous toward her at the institute. At times in the past week, Kaye had caught him looking at her with an expression of gnarled, old world speculation, eyes drawn to wrinkled slits, like a satyr carved out of olive wood and stained brown. He had a reputation among the women who worked at Eliava, that he could not be trusted all the time, particularly with the young ones. But he had always treated Kaye with the utmost civility, even, as now, with concern. He did not want her to be sad, yet he could not think of any reason she should be cheerful.
Despite its beauty, Georgia had many blemishes: civil war, assassinations, and now, mass graves.
They lurched into a wall of rain. The windshield wipers flapped black tails and cleaned about a third of Lado’s view. ‘Good on Ioseb Stalin, he left us sewage,’ he mused. ‘Good son of Georgia. Our most famous export, better than wine.’ Lado grinned falsely at her. He seemed both ashamed and defensive. Kaye could not help but draw him out. ‘He killed millions,’ she murmured. ‘He killed Dr Eliava.’
Lado stared grimly through the streaks to see what lay beyond the short hood. He geared down and braked, then careened around a ditch big enough to hide a cow. Kaye made a small squeak and grabbed the side of her seat. There were no guard rails on this stretch, and below the highway yawned a steep drop of at least three hundred meters to a glacial melt river. ‘It was Beria declared Dr Eliava a People’s Enemy,’ Lado said matter-of-factly, as if relating old family history. ‘Beria was head of Georgian KGB then, local child-abusing sonabitch, not mad wolf of all Russia.’
‘He was Stalin’s man,’ Kaye said, trying to keep her mind off the road. She could not understand any pride the Georgians took in Stalin.
‘They were all Stalin’s men or they died,’ Lado said.
He shrugged. ‘There was a big stink here when Khrushchev said Stalin was bad. What do we know? He screwed us so many ways for so many years we thought he must be a husband.’
This Kaye found amusing. Lado took encouragement from her grin.
‘Some still want to return to prosperity under Communism. Or we have prosperity in shit.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘I’ll take the shit.’
They descended in the next hour into less fearsome foothills and plateaux. Road signs in curling Georgian script showed the rusted pocks of dozens of bullet holes. ‘Half an hour, no more,’ Lado said.
The thick rain made the border between day and night difficult to judge. Lado switched on the Fiat’s dim little headlights as they approached a crossroad and the turn-off to the small town of Gordi.
Two armored personnel carriers flanked the highway just before the crossroads. Five Russian peacekeepers dressed in slickers and rounded piss-bucket helmets wearily flagged them down.
Lado braked the Fiat to a stop, canted slightly on the shoulder. Kaye could see another ditch just yards ahead, right in the crotch of the crossroad. They would have to drive on the shoulder to go around it.
Lado rolled down his window. A Russian soldier of nineteen or twenty, with rosy choirboy cheeks, peered in. His helmet dribbled rain on Lado’s sleeve. Lado spoke to him in Russian.
‘American?’
