Yura’s Zhiguli was a metaphor for the disintegrating state of our Soyuz. Innocent tourist side jaunts metastasized into days-long quests for accelerator components. Every fill-her-up of black market gas cost five monthly salaries. Meantime all around us they were renaming the landscape. Kharkov in Ukraine was no more; it was Kharkiv now, in Ukrainian. Lenin and Marx streets clanged into dustbins.
By the time we sputtered into Abkhazia’s civil-war-torn Black Sea capital of Sukhumi, I no longer knew whom to side with in ethnic conflicts, whom to trust. I now put my faith in anyone who put out a hot meal. I trusted and loved the wiry young Abkhazian driver lent to us by the local writers’ union to help fix our sardine can on wheels. The kid proudly took us to his parents’ village house for a meal. We ate bitterish, gamy wild duck shot that morning—smothered in a thick, tomatoey, fiery sauce. It might have been the most memorable dish of my life. Then the excellent youngster stole Yura’s last gas canister.
To Sukhumi we carried an introduction from our Moscow acquaintance Fazil Iskander, the greatest living Abkhazian writer. During an electrical blackout we called at the darkened flat of Alexei Gogua, chief of the Abkhazian Writers Union. We found the gray-haired Gogua writing in his pajama pants by a flickering candle. What terrible straits we’d landed him in! Abkhaz hospitality demanded a resplendent welcome. We were visiting foreign writers—sent by Fazil, the Abkhaz Mark Twain. But Sukhumi’s infrastructure was shattered. Which is how a Zhiguli convoy of separatist culturati accompanied us to the well-lit country house of a prominent winemaker.
Shortly before seven p.m. I slipped out to the kitchen.
“Due to the situation which has evolved…”
The inevitable/impossible was finally happening. At seven p.m. on Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was giving his resignation speech.
The situation had developed further and fatally for him. Several weeks earlier, his thorn-in-the-side Yeltsin had secretly met leaders of Ukraine and Byelorussia at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in a Byelorussian forest. The troika’s advisers and lawyers cooked up a devilish plan: As founding members of the 1922 Union Treaty, the three republics had the power to annul it—to simply dissolve the USSR! In its place they formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Byelorussian herbal vodka lubricated the signing. Before bothering to inform Gorbachev, Yeltsin telephoned the news to George H. W. Bush. (“Dear George,” he addressed him now.) At a subsequent meeting in Kazakhstan, eight more republics went ex-Union. Clearly Gorbachev was finished.
And yet his TV announcement caught me by total surprise, there with my uneaten spoonful of Abkhazian corn mush. Reading from a paper, often awkwardly, the last leader of Sovetsky Soyuz spoke for ten minutes. He lauded his own democratic reforms. Admitted mistakes. Took credit for the elimination of a totalitarian system and for “newly acquired spiritual and political freedom.” About the new freedom and such he wasn’t fabulizing exactly, but the ladies around me gently waved him off. His phrases rang meaningless, false—simply because after all his flip-flopping, who’d ever believe him?
The USSR’s dying minutes still replay in my mind in dazed, elegiac slow motion.
I recall the exact words that Gorbachev mangled in his crass provincial accent (so at odds with his suave international image). I taste the salty cheese in the corn mush, inhale the kitchen’s garlicky pungencies; I hear the thudding splat of a pomegranate heavy with seeds that—another metaphor for the Imperium?—fell on the kitchen floor and cracked open.
The Abkhaz women had been watching impassively for the most part, chins propped in hands. But as the resignee thanked his supporters and wished his countrymen best, the lady of the house whispered:
“Zhalko, a vse-taki zhalko.”
“Zhalko,” echoed the others: “A shame, a shame, in the end.”
“Zhalko,” I murmured along, not sure what we were wistful about. The sudden humanity of a tone-deaf reformer—hero abroad, villain at home? The finis, the official, irrevocable curtain falling on our fairy-tale communal lie, the utopian social experiment for which millions of lives had been brutally sacrificed—now signing off in the most undramatic fashion imaginable? Empires! They weren’t supposed to gurgle away in ten badly colorized minutes. The locomotive carrying citizens into a brighter tomorrow wasn’t meant to just run out of gas and die in the middle of nowhere, like one more woebegone Zhiguli.
As Gorbachev later wrote in his memoirs, he got no farewell ceremony, no phone calls from presidents of former Soviet republics. They didn’t believe in the friendship of nations. Were there any murmurs of “a shame” from them at the end?
When the speech was over, the blazing red Soviet banner was lowered for the very last time in history, and a peppy Russian tricolor rose in its place.
A new day in a new state, said the announcer, and the TV reverted to regular programming. A cartoon, I think it was, or maybe a puppet show.
I know you’ll wonder how it felt to wake up next day in a new state. Only I didn’t wake up—not till two whole days later. My brain pounded violently against my temples. My blurred vision registered white-coated people bending over me with expressions of saccharine Soviet concern. “How is our golovka, our little head?” they cooed, waving smelling salts under my nose. Where was I? Ah, yes… the only place in darkened Sukhumi with its own electrical generator. The Sanatorium of the Russian Armed Forces, where we’d been lodged on arrival by the hospitable Abkhazian writers. After the USSR ended on TV there’d been toasts, many toasts—flowery prodigies of Caucasian eloquence laboriously translated from Abkhaz to Russian to English (for the sake of the Derridarian, who was now sprawled beside me, ghostly pale and grunting). Dimly I recalled the ritualistic pouring of homemade Izabella wine onto the roof of our decrepit sardine can around four a.m. The equally ritualistic guzzling down of a farewell kantsi, a horn filled with 1.5 liters of the same such Izabella. Gogua, the elderly writer-in-chief, collapsing softly into the arms of his secretary.
“Golovka, the little head, how is it?” pressed the white-coated people.
The golovka pounded and hammered and throbbed. Passed out from epic alcohol poisoning. That’s how, since you asked, I greeted the dawn of a new historical era. Ah, Izabella.
Ah, dawn; historical hungover dawn…
The Zhiguli’s engine finally expired somewhere near Kiev, and in exchange for a bottle, a GAZ truck towed Yura the Christ-like geologist eight hundred miles to Moscow. John and I took the overnight train with its red-carpeted corridor. Back in Melbourne again, where it was summer, we sat on a green hill leaning on our two massive suitcases, homeless and miserable—the sublet we’d arranged had fallen through. Soon I left my Derridarian in Australia and returned to New York. Our relationship sank under the strain of the USSR’s dying days—though it took us a few more long-distance years (he moved to California) to break up officially. His travel book never came out.