District. Palatial digs by Soviet standards, the sanatorium sits amid twenty sensual acres of palms, orchids, and oleanders: a botanist’s subtropical dream. It was the only place left to stay. Georgian units had commandeered the rest of the hotels. The Abkhaz had shelled others into disrepair.
The sanatorium oozed with the air of empire, a coveted Kremlin colonial outpost. Russian generals had vacationed here for decades. You could feel their ghosts frolicking on the spacious balconies. The foamy waves of the Black Sea lapped onto the beaches below them.
Most of the “resort” workers abdicated as the war intensified—leaving behind a crew of local caretakers. The gaggle of clerks, cooks, and cleaners had long been at the condescending beck and call of vacationing generals. Now, like a group of mutinous deckhands who’d thrown their sadistic captain overboard, they reveled in ironic revenge. There were almost no guests, no running water, and little food. Notoriously inaccurate missiles fired by the Abkhaz regularly scored direct hits on the sanatorium grounds, blasting out windows. The now-ruling worker class was oblivious to these inconveniences. The estate was theirs, and they relished it.
One of the newly crowned was Marina, a chambermaid. A gregarious, wispy fifty-something, Marina was permanently clad in homemade black ruffled skirts that reached her ankles, even in the most oppressive of sea humidity. She derived great joy from her newfound powers. Marina took special delight in one particular act: conferring the keys to rooms once reserved for the top Soviet military elite unto hitherto unauthorized ruffians like me.
Leading me to my room, Marina would dangle the keys suggestively from their carved wooden tags and then carefully glide them into the locks. With the weight of her small body behind her, she’d dramatically push open the doors to reveal my double-roomed chamber with twelve-foot ceilings. There were large beds with ruffled spreads, kitsch red-velvet love seats, and amenities like the crystal water decanters that doubled as receptacles for my morning birdbaths. The decanters were a godsend, for when I turned on the wheeled taps in the bathroom, usually nothing came out. At best, foul-smelling brown water trickled down.
“General Ivanov once holidayed here for two weeks,” Marina cackled. “I’ll tell you something else: Comrade Belinsky’s wife used to love to sleep in this bed, and not always alone.” She giggled, placing the keys in my hands as if they were diamonds.
Every evening as the sun was setting over the sea, at precisely eight o’clock, the caretakers switched on a rumbling old diesel generator. The sanatorium became practically the only island of light in the darkened capital. The few of us who called the sanatorium home gathered nightlyon the veranda. We drank from jugs of crude homemade wine and smoked the chokingly acrid local Abkhazian-produced cigarettes, Astra. With little else to do, we watched and listened to evenings of exploding artillery shells.
We could often see blasts from a pier a few hundred meters away. The Abkhaz shelled it nightly. In the lush hills surrounding the city, firefights erupted in quick bursts. We traded vacuous interpretations about what was going on, trying to make sense of it all. It was a way to pass time, aided by bravado about the ongoing battles.
Neither the Abkhaz nor the government shed much illumination on the situation. They bragged of astounding but nonexistent battlefield triumphs. They underestimated their losses with equal shamelessness. Yes, one could visit the front, but that offered few real clues about what was going on. This was a war being fought mostly with random barrages. Both sides favored rockets whose nickname grad means “hail,” as in a hailstorm. They were just as inaccurate as their name. During attacks, they rained on the besieged capital from truck-mounted batteries that could fire off a couple of dozen of the
The sanatorium oozed with the air of empire, a coveted Kremlin colonial outpost. Russian generals had vacationed here for decades. You could feel their ghosts frolicking on the spacious balconies. The foamy waves of the Black Sea lapped onto the beaches below them.
Most of the “resort” workers abdicated as the war intensified—leaving behind a crew of local caretakers. The gaggle of clerks, cooks, and cleaners had long been at the condescending beck and call of vacationing generals. Now, like a group of mutinous deckhands who’d thrown their sadistic captain overboard, they reveled in ironic revenge. There were almost no guests, no running water, and little food. Notoriously inaccurate missiles fired by the Abkhaz regularly scored direct hits on the sanatorium grounds, blasting out windows. The now-ruling worker class was oblivious to these inconveniences. The estate was theirs, and they relished it.
One of the newly crowned was Marina, a chambermaid. A gregarious, wispy fifty-something, Marina was permanently clad in homemade black ruffled skirts that reached her ankles, even in the most oppressive of sea humidity. She derived great joy from her newfound powers. Marina took special delight in one particular act: conferring the keys to rooms once reserved for the top Soviet military elite unto hitherto unauthorized ruffians like me.
Leading me to my room, Marina would dangle the keys suggestively from their carved wooden tags and then carefully glide them into the locks. With the weight of her small body behind her, she’d dramatically push open the doors to reveal my double-roomed chamber with twelve-foot ceilings. There were large beds with ruffled spreads, kitsch red-velvet love seats, and amenities like the crystal water decanters that doubled as receptacles for my morning birdbaths. The decanters were a godsend, for when I turned on the wheeled taps in the bathroom, usually nothing came out. At best, foul-smelling brown water trickled down.
“General Ivanov once holidayed here for two weeks,” Marina cackled. “I’ll tell you something else: Comrade Belinsky’s wife used to love to sleep in this bed, and not always alone.” She giggled, placing the keys in my hands as if they were diamonds.
Every evening as the sun was setting over the sea, at precisely eight o’clock, the caretakers switched on a rumbling old diesel generator. The sanatorium became practically the only island of light in the darkened capital. The few of us who called the sanatorium home gathered nightlyon the veranda. We drank from jugs of crude homemade wine and smoked the chokingly acrid local Abkhazian-produced cigarettes, Astra. With little else to do, we watched and listened to evenings of exploding artillery shells.
We could often see blasts from a pier a few hundred meters away. The Abkhaz shelled it nightly. In the lush hills surrounding the city, firefights erupted in quick bursts. We traded vacuous interpretations about what was going on, trying to make sense of it all. It was a way to pass time, aided by bravado about the ongoing battles.
Neither the Abkhaz nor the government shed much illumination on the situation. They bragged of astounding but nonexistent battlefield triumphs. They underestimated their losses with equal shamelessness. Yes, one could visit the front, but that offered few real clues about what was going on. This was a war being fought mostly with random barrages. Both sides favored rockets whose nickname grad means “hail,” as in a hailstorm. They were just as inaccurate as their name. During attacks, they rained on the besieged capital from truck-mounted batteries that could fire off a couple of dozen of the
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