“Hard by a Great Forest” by Leo Vardiashivili
Inevitably, place matters. Anyone asked to describe themselves or to share “their story” will, at some point, say something about place: where they live, where they have lived, where they were born, where they have been, where they wish to go, even where their ancestors resided or settled. Place is integral to individual identity and often suggests more than geographical location: “place” also hints at something about history, culture, beliefs, and values.
It should not be surprising, then, that when an individual, especially a child, is unexpectedly separated from their “place”—of home and/or homeland—that separation can confuse and even traumatize the child (where do I belong? What language do I speak? Do I fit in with this place?), even if that separation was necessary, as for political or security reasons. Familiarity in and of place offers a safe environment for thriving and flourishing, and a loss of familiarity can stymie that growth, or create a significant lacuna in a person’s development.
The novelist Leo Vardiashivili understands well the vital importance of place and the emotional toll that removal from a familiar place can exact on an individual. Vardiashivili was himself a child refugee from his native Georgia (the country—see map) in the early 1990s, when the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the subsequent civil war in Georgia plunged his country into chaos and violence. In order to survive, the Vardiashivili family fled their home and settled in England as political refugees. The effects of that experience have inspired his commendable first novel, “Hard by a Great Forest,” a story he wrote in English, the language of his adopted country, with the hope (possibly) of reaching a wider audience. It is a deeply poignant and achingly sincere novel about the engrained bonds of family ties, the permanent scarring of lost loves, and the undeniable importance of place.
An evocative narrative and riveting quest-adventure populated by charismatic and distinctive characters, “Hard by a Great Forest” also bears witness to the personal complexity of immigration, the bittersweet hauntings of fading memories, and yearning anguish of hoped-for reconciliations with lost family and friends. The decision of the author to tell the story through a (fictionalized) first-person narration allows the reader to enter into the emotional arc of the narrator, not as an external observer but as a companion along the way. The novel is fiction but it is also the actual story of any person who has lost their “place,” howsoever ‘place’ is understood.
That narrator of the novel is Saba Sulidze-Donauri (“Saba”), a Georgian refugee who, as the novel begins around 2012, has been living in London for almost two decades with his father Irakli and older brother Sandro. They have managed to make for themselves a seemingly tolerable life over the years, yet from the very beginning, Saba makes very clear that that life came with a steep price, perhaps too costly in retrospect. Saba opens the novel with a tragic confession: ‘Where’s Eka?’ We must have asked a thousand times. Our mother stayed so we could escape. (1) The kinds of wrenching decisions that fearful emigrants must make can only be imagined by those of us who have never been in such circumstances: for Saba and his family, there were no good choices, only practical solutions. It was impossible for them to remain in Georgia, where they lived in the capital, Tbilisi, because the early 1990s in Georgia was a time of brutal civil war and Tbilisi itself … was a living nightmare. No electricity, no gas, no running water. Go out for bread and you were just as likely to catch a bullet as a loaf… almost half the population fled the country in those days. Most, never to return. (16)
As the situation was especially dire for two boys quickly growing into adolescence (at the time, Sandro was ten and Saba, eight) and so reaching the age of conscription, there was no question that the family would leave Georgia. However, emigrating from the country was a costly endeavor since…(g)etting out of the country meant shady bribes, stolen travel stamps, and counterfeit certificates…(1) and, with such additional costs, the family could afford only one other person to accompany Sandro and Saba. It finally came down to practicalities: Eka, their mother, did not have a passport, and Irakli, their father, did, and so Irakli and Eka decided that Irakli would emigrate with his sons from Georgia and that Eka would remain in their home until Irakli could accrue sufficient funds for her passage out of Georgia. Saba and Sandro agreed to go only because of Irakli’s promise to send for their mother as soon as there was enough money for her to emigrate but the loss of their home, their homeland, and especially their beloved mother, would dismally affect the brothers for years.
Not surprisingly, saving enough money to send for Eka took longer than expected and it seemed that there would never be enough money. Saba recounts the “vagabond trek across Europe” that they made when first out of Georgia, a journey that involved selling whatever they had in order to eat and to find shelter, which often meant sleeping in parks and in train stations, and that only ended when they were able to cross into England after having sold their one last (and precious) family heirloom for Chunnel train tickets. The monetary cost of the journey across Europe meant that Irakli and his sons began their lives in England with absolutely nothing. As Saba explains, Irakli was able to eke out only a basic living by working any menial jobs he could find—picking fruits and vegetables, painting walls, stacking shelves— but every penny he made seemed to disappear into rental fees, grocery bills, and daily care for two growing boys. However, embittered and frightened by their impoverished situation, Irakli descended into episodes deep melancholy and heavy drinking, so that Sandro and Saba had to fend for themselves. As Saba recalls, …left without Eka, Sandro and I developed our own language … and entertained ourselves by building elaborate scavenger hunts in our little council flat… (55) The two brothers created for themselves a ‘place’ of safety in their bleak and lonely situation, developing a language no one else could understand and going on safe searches for mysterious treasures.
By the time Irakli was able to gather enough money to send for Eka (with whom they had been in diffident and sparse contact), years had passed. He entrusted the money to a fellow Georgian—an ‘honest’ man, Irakli had decided—who was their neighbor in London but who had decided to return to Tbilisi. Irakli asked the man to bring the money to Eka so she could pay her way out of Georgia and the man quickly agreed but he left with the money and was never seen again. Eka never received the money, and, few years after that horrible episode, Irakli and his sons learned that Eka had died. Knowledge of her death, and the scorching guilt of Irakli, set off a series of decisions and events that propels the primary storyline of the novel.
Irakli decided to return to Georgia because, as Saba muses, …he’d talk about places he’d been with Eka, the parks and the cafes where they spent time, the trails and paths they cut through Tbilisi. Day by day, he lost interest in the future and his eyes filled up with the past. (5) Sandro and Saba were adult men by this time and on their own, their eyes filled only with the future: Irakli, however, was driven to return to their homeland and recover the past. After several failed attempts, Irakli finally boarded a plane and flew to Georgia. He kept in touch with his sons only fitfully, but after a silence of two months, the brothers received what would be Irakli’s final correspondence, a brief email hinting ominously at some untoward event and his decision to flee into the dense mountains of Georgia to evade “those people” who were pursuing him. He also ordered his sons not to come after him. The information agitated the brothers: Who were those people? Police? Criminals? Former neighbors nursing ancient vendettas? Where exactly was Irakli? Why could they not travel to Georgia themselves? Sandro and Saba, of course, do not heed his instructions: Sandro is first to leave, but then, when he does not hear from his brother after several weeks, Saba also then flies to Georgia to locate his father and brother so they can all return to England.
The title of the novel, “Hard by a Great Forest,” offers a clue to the reader about the kind of journey Saba will undertake. It is a phrase in the opening of the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” that his mother Eka would read to Saba and Sandro when they were little. It was a favorite story of the brothers, one of many such stories Eka would share with them from her hidden supply of underground books about fairies and witches and wizards and magical animals (hidden because, at the time, all Western literature had been banned for popular consumption by the Soviet overlords). Hansel and Gretel were the children of a poor German woodcutter who lived at the edge (“hard by”) a great and mysterious forest to which they were soon banished by their evil stepmother because there was not enough food at home to feed them. The brother and sister attempted to survive by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs on the forest floor to guide them back home, but soon realized that birds had eaten all the bread crumbs of their makeshift trail. Lost in the woods, Hansel and Gretel discover deceit, danger, phantasms, and inexplicable evil before they are able to find a way out of the forest. The allusion to their perilous adventure intimates much about Saba’s own experience.
When Saba finally arrives in Georgia, he might as well have been in an ominous wood: although technically a native Georgian, he feels completely out of place there (and the locals regard him as such) and unsure of how and where to begin his search. It is only the unexpected but quite helpful intervention of a loquacious cab driver, Nodar (the most charismatic character in the novel and the heart of the story), that provides Saba with the support which he desperately needs. Nodar is himself a ‘displaced’ person, but within Georgia: he is a native of South Ossetia, a distinct territory (and people, related to Iranians, unlike the Caucasian Georgians) and disputed region within the borders of Georgia that has long struggled for its independence from Georgian (and, previously, Soviet) political authority. Nodar feels ‘out of place’ in Georgia as much as does Saba. Nodar and his wife become impromptu caretakers of an increasingly overwrought Saba, adhering to the old Georgian proverb that “a guest is a gift from God,” and Nodar affectionately refers to Saba as “Mowgli”, Rudyard Kipling’s orphan boy, abandoned by his own kind and raised by wolves in the wild jungle.
Although Sandro has also disappeared like his father, he left Saba literary ‘bread crumbs’ to follow: concealed pages of poetry and prose, paper slices of favorite (and previously forbidden) literature, that, as in their childhood scavenger hunts, offered clues to Saba about the proper direction of his journey. Saba and Nodar soon realize, however, that the search for Irakli and Sandro must be surreptitious because of the persistent surveillance of the local civil and political police, but Nodar’s practical wisdom guides Saba across the complicated and byzantine landscape of contemporary Georgia. The quest for Irakli and Sandro sends the two men into the more rural and isolated regions of Georgia—from cities to gardens to forests to towns and villages to farms and then mountain wildernesses—and more deeply into the past, as once-dormant memories and secret histories begin to emerge.
Their journey along the trail crafted by Sandro’s literary clues soon becomes more significant than the actual destination: garrulous ghosts intrude upon Saba at the most inconvenient moments and ply him with (sometimes sage, sometimes imprudent) advice, thus thrusting the past unceremoniously into the present. Memories begin to flood Saba’s mind and challenge Saba to reckon with emotions he has long ignored or suppressed. Nodar, however, is just the opposite: his life is thick with memories and ghosts to which he steadfastly clings in order to survive in the present. His spectral presences are aural, gleaned from tuning in whenever possible to an underground radio station that broadcasts covert messages to and from separated family and friends who wish to share information about themselves, about lost loved ones, or about places to meet for cautious reunions.
Both men are living in a liminal state, both in and outside of actual time, both in and beyond physical place. However, throughout the novel, but especially during the most treacherous part of their journey, Nodar reminds Saba that “You can’t walk out of this world,” and that wrenching truth will clarify for Saba—and the reader—what he had been actually seeking, not just in his return to Georgia, but throughout his life. “Hard by a Great” Forest offers a reader the opportunity to walk with Saba and Nodar on their poignant and fateful journey, carried along by vivid and expressive prose.
June-Ann Greeley, Ph.D., is Professor of Languages, Literature and Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. She is trained in classical languages and literature and Medieval Studies, specifically late antique and medieval theology and literature, religious and intellectual history, and classical/medieval (Latin) poetry. Dr. Greeley translates and interprets late antique, Celtic and medieval Latin theological and literary works and explores late antique and medieval spirituality, including the literature of medieval women, medieval mystics (Christian and Sufism); sacred art and architecture; medieval and modern Celtic authors; the emergence of Islam in medieval Europe; Dante Studies, and global medievalisms.
