UBelow was night, but above was day. This photo shines in my memory and also in my phone like the starry sky, here on paper it appears dull and a bit sober.
When I saw the monumental Kazbek, the church shining like a celestial body and the buried lights of a village at the foot of the mountain, I thought that I could never have climbed higher than now. I stood in a dark hotel room and took photos. It was pitch black outside, but the sky in the photos turned out to be blue and the dark colossus – white. The size of the Kazbek standing opposite me was also domesticated in the photo. I explored the difference between what I was seeing and the images my iPhone was registering and took several photos in an attempt to bring it closer to what I was seeing. Vain. Secretly, I was glad that I couldn’t capture what I saw. It would stay here, once in a while, in this moment, in this place. I put the phone down and stood still, with no sense of time. It was a moment of arrival, of calm. The thought that man cannot rise higher in the face of such beauty knocked in my head.
As if my father had been waiting for me
At that moment, my phone, which I had put aside, rang. It was my mother from distant Kiev. I thought, “Now” and immediately understood that my father was dying. I looked at Mount Kazbek, at the Gergeti Church, at the village. Nothing had changed, only someone had breathed death into the picture. It was the time of the highest corona numbers in Georgia, there was a curfew in the evening, and a plane flew from Tbilisi to Kiev only every three weeks. When I arrived in Kiev, my father lived a few more hours, as if he had been waiting for me. I sat down next to him, he was breathing like he was very close to the goal. I could feel the air getting thinner around him, rising higher and higher as if he were scaling a mountain. I didn’t know death could be like this, I thought, without wanting to romanticize my father’s suffering. He’d never been to Georgia, but I had a feeling that’s exactly what he saw, and by ‘exactly’ I don’t mean this photo, but the view from the room that couldn’t be photographed.
Images are not directly linked to the calendar, but rather to inner mechanisms of memory and association. This image of one of the highest mountains in Europe, to which, according to legend, Prometheus was tied, also sprang from a strange accumulation of thoughts. For a year now I’ve only been writing about the war and I’m always looking for photos, paralyzed, with the feeling that I can’t write about this war anymore. Maybe it was also due to a Ukrainian poem I was reading – from the 19th century about the Caucasus, about its unruly peoples and about Russia enslaving other peoples.
I have shed so many tears over this poem as if it were all happening now, as if these plagues were not history but fate. I thought about moving to Georgia and how the poetry of the Caucasus penetrated every pore of my life and even became a topography: In Tbilisi I moved into a house where the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka once lived, by sheer coincidence. Recent images of last week’s protests in Tbilisi brought my thoughts back to the Maidan in Kiev. However, I felt committed to today’s war and spent hours roaming through the new attacks by Russia on residential buildings in Ukraine, the ruins of the completely destroyed city of Marjinka and new countless pictures of funerals. I looked into the faces of mourners and hesitated. My elderly father’s death seemed clear, calm, comprehensible to me. I don’t know how to communicate this new grief, over and over again. Perhaps this mountain arose from grief and stands by this grief.