flesh left on the torsos, and some unfamiliar ligaments on the skull around the forehead, eyes and cheeks, like dark straps, quite dry. She looked for signs of insect casings and found dead blowfly larvae on one withered throat, but not many. The bodies had been buried within a few hours of death. She surmised they had not been buried in the dead of winter, when blowflies were not about. Of course, winters at this altitude were mild in Georgia.
She picked up a small pocket knife lying next to the closest torso and lifted a shred of fabric, what had once been white cotton, then pried up a stiff, concave flap of skin over the abdomen. There were bullet entry holes in the fabric and abdominal skin overlying the pelvis. ‘God,’ she said.
Within the pelvis, cradled in dirt and stiff wraps of dried tissue, lay a smaller body, curled, little more than a heap of tiny bones, its skull collapsed.
‘Colonel.’ She showed Beck. His face turned stony.
The bodies could conceivably have been fifty years old, but if so, they were in remarkably good condition. Some wool and cotton remained. Everything was very dry. Drainage swept around this area now. The trenches were deep. But the roots –
Chikurishivili spoke again. His tone seemed more cooperative, even guilty. There was a lot of guilt to go around over the centuries.
‘He says they are both female,’ Lado whispered to Kaye.
‘I see that,’ she muttered.
She walked around the table to examine the second torso. This one had no skin over the abdomen. She scraped the dirt aside, making the torso rock with a sound like a dried gourd. Another small skull lay within the pelvis, a fetus about six months along, same as the other. The torso’s limbs were missing; Kaye could not tell if the legs had been held together in the grave.
Neither of the fetuses had been expelled by pressure of abdominal gases.
‘Both pregnant,’ she said. Lado translated this into Georgian.
Beck said in a low voice, ‘We count about sixty individuals. The women seem to have been shot. It looks as if the men were shot or clubbed to death.’
Chikurishivili pointed to Beck, and then back to the camp, and shouted, his face ruddy in the backwash of flashlight glow. Jugashvili, Stalin. The officer said the graves had been dug a few years before the Great People’s War, during the purges. The late 1930s. That would make them almost seventy years old, ancient news, nothing for the UN to become involved in. Lado said, ‘He wants the UN and the Russians out of here. He says this is an internal matter, not for peacekeepers.’
Beck spoke again, less soothingly, to the Georgian officer. Lado decided he did not want to be in the middle of this exchange and walked around to where Kaye was leaning over the second torso. ‘Nasty business,’ he said.
‘Too long,’ Kaye spoke softly.
‘What?’ Lado asked.
‘Seventy years is much too long,’ she said. ‘Tell me what they’re arguing about.’ She prodded the unfamiliar straps of tissue or leather around the eye sockets with the pocket knife. They seemed to form a kind of mask. Had they been hooded before being executed? She did not think so. The attachments were dark and stringy and persistent.
‘The UN man is saying there is no limit on war crimes,’ Lado told her. ‘No statue – what is it – statute of limitations.’
‘He’s right,’ Kaye said. She rolled the skull over gently. The occipital had been fractured laterally and pushed in to a depth of three centimeters.
She returned her attention to the tiny skeleton cradled within the pelvis of the second torso. She had taken some courses in embryology in her second year in med school. The fetus’s bone structure seemed a little odd, but she did not want to damage the skull by pulling it loose from the caked soil and dried tissue. She had intruded enough already.
Kaye felt queasy, sickened not by the shriveled and dried remains, but by what her imagination was already reconstructing. She straightened and waved to get Beck’s attention.
‘These women were shot in the stomach,’ she said. Kill all the firstborn children. Furious monsters. ‘Murdered.’ She clamped her teeth.
‘How long ago?’
‘He may be right about the age of the boot, if it came from this grave, but that doesn’t look right to me. The roots around the edge of the trenches are too small. My guess is the victims died as recently as two or three years ago. The dirt here looks dry, but the soil is probably acid, and that would dissolve any bones over a few years old. Then there’s the fabric; it looks like wool and cotton, and that means the grave is just a few years old. If it’s synthetic, it could be older, but that gives us a date after Stalin, too.’
Beck approached her and lifted his mask. ‘Can you help us until the others get here?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘How long?’ Kaye asked.
‘Four, five days,’ Beck said. Several paces distant, Chikurishivili shifted his gaze between them, jaw clenched, resentful, as if cops had interrupted a domestic quarrel.
Kaye caught herself holding her breath. She turned away, stepped back, sucked in some air, then asked, ‘You’re going to start a war crimes investigation?’
‘The Russians think we should,’ Beck said. ‘They’re hot to discredit the new Communists back home. A few old atrocities could supply them with fresh ammunition. If you could give us a best guess – two years, five, thirty, whatever?’
‘Less than ten. Probably less than five. I’m very rusty,’ she said. ‘I can only do a few things. Take samples, some tissue specimens. Not a full autopsy, of course.’
‘You’re a thousand times better than letting the locals muck around,’ Beck said. ‘I don’t trust any of them. I’m not sure the Russians can be trusted, either. They all have axes to grind, one way or the other.’
Lado kept a stiff face and did not comment, nor did he translate for Chikurishivili.
Kaye felt what she had known would come, had dreaded: the old dark mood creep over her. She had thought that by being away from Saul and traveling, she might shake the bad times, the bad feelings. She had felt liberated watching the doctors and technicians working at the Eliava Institute, doing so much good with so few resources, literally pulling health out of sewage. The grand and beautiful side of the Republic of Georgia. Now … Flip the coin. Papa Ioseb Stalin or ethnic cleansers, Georgians trying to move out Armenians and Ossetians, Abkhazis trying to move out Georgians, Russians sending in troops, Chechens becoming involved.
Dirty little wars between ancient neighbors with ancient grievances.
This was not going to be good for her, but she could not refuse.
Lado wrinkled his face and stared up at Beck. ‘They were going to be mothers?’
‘Most of them,’ Beck said. ‘And maybe some were going to be fathers.’
The end of the cave
