The Cushion

"I was born 32 years ago, in 1986, in the Soviet Republic, and in 1991, I became the citizen of an independent Georgia. I was too young to remember much, but I have heard a great deal from family and acquaintances, and read countless accounts. My father Tengiz Jobava was a dissident. As early as 1962, he was a member of an illegal, underground organization founded in the Georgian city of Zugdidi, which intended to awaken the national spirit through the dissemination of secret proclamations. At that time, he worked at a press and he would secretly take fonts away to help print these illicit proclamations. In 1963, he was arrested and held in the cellar of the KGB building for a long time. They tried to make him speak about his secret activities by torturing him physically and psychologically. Thankfully, because the officials neither broke him nor found any proclamations hidden in his house, they were not able to prove his guilt and had to let him go. From the 1970s, he fought alongside Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the future first president of independent Georgia and the leader of the national liberation movement. “My father was a dissident; he worked at a press and would secretly take fonts away to help print illicit proclamations” So, naturally, the first memories of my childhood are associated with the political events of the time; in fact, I hardly have any memories from my childhood that are not associated with politics. I remember standing in front of the TV in 1989, at the age of three or four, my fists clenched tight, shouting ‘hail to Independent Georgia!’ to encourage the protesters staring out at me. The tragedy of that day—April 9, 1989, when the Soviet army violently repressed peaceful Georgian protesters, who had gathered in front of the parliament building to demand independence—resulted in the death of 21 people, while many others were injured. In that sense, the Soviet regime put an end to its own reign—change had to come, although of course it was not straightforward and the price was great. The declaration of independence in 1991 was soon followed by a coup, the persecution of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and his death in ambiguous circumstances (the official version states that it was a suicide, however, most people believe the president was betrayed and murdered). Then came war between Georgia and Russia, as a result of which Russia occupied Abkhazia, the oldest region of Georgia. Many refugees came from Abkhazia and settled in Georgian cities. About that same time, criminal groups began to rule the streets, rob houses and terrorize civilians—the country was plunged into a whirlwind of crime and corruption. I remember how, in the days of the coup, my father found handfuls of bullet shells in the yard every day; I remember standing with my mother for hours, queuing for our rations and how, when somebody tricked or cheated others to advance in the queue, fights would break out: the farther you stood from the counter, the greater the chance was that you’d return home with no bread that day. I remember the happiness of my parents when my father’s friend, from time to time, would bring jars of milk powder gleaned from humanitarian aid imports. I remember how inflation began, and deposits and savings, which had accumulated in bank accounts for years, lost all value. I remember, how the gas supply was cut permanently, and a large cloud of smoke appeared above the city, as the entire population resorted to wood-burning stoves, brought in from rural villages, to warm themselves. Of course, not everyone could afford firewood, and they had to stay in bed with their all their clothes and blankets on. I remember how the electricity went off every day—sometimes we had none for several days, and we would sit in the dark, reading and studying by candlelight. I’m actually still scared of the dark. The Cushion chronicles the events of that period, when the country was full of dishonest bureaucrats and black marketeers. The main character of the novel is a writer, living in the Tbilisi of the 1990s, who considers himself a “true and respectable member of the society of has-beens”—he finds it very difficult to adjust. Everyone and everything seems to have transformed: former sportsmen are now politicians, former peasants are now traders, former builders, taxi drivers or doctors are now directors of construction companies, former writers are now smugglers. The writer has a wife and a son he needs to support. He also has a friend called Vakho, a drug addict with whom he intends to set up a business, in the hope of keeping himself and his family alive (the lack of money leads to his frequent family conflict). Everybody is trying to save him or herself. At one point, the friends decide to go to church—but religious life proves to be a disappointment and offers them no consolation. No ideology can get through to him. Unfamiliar and strange rituals, which have nothing to do with faith, seem to have become normal. The friends conceive a money-making plan: each of them will sell a kidney for $5,000. That plan fails, too. Then, the writer is offered a position within a political party—but he doesn’t find his place there either… The text is highly emotional, and it makes the reader sympathize with these characters trying to crawl out from under the ruins of the Soviet Union. The form of the novel is also very original and interesting. Samsonadze’s book is a kind of an experiment: the short novel, which reads as if it were written in a single day, consists in only one paragraph. Big ideas are conveyed through short, succinct sentences, sometimes of just two or three words. So the reader can read the entire book in a single day, too. And while reading, you can’t miss the internal music and rhythm of the text—there’s a kind of poetry here, too. The Cushion is as truthful, honest, precise and bare an account of Georgia in 1990s as you’re likely to find. Irakli Samsonadze, who, as I mentioned was also a playwright and worked on movie scripts too, once explained it himself. The structure of The Cushion , he said, and I’m paraphrasing, was based on movie editing’s (montage) principle: word—dot, word—dot, word—dot and then a picture, landscape, portrait, mood, action. As the author explained, you might expect this to require plenty of paragraphs, but in The Cushion he aimed to convey each element in only a few words. This meant he needed to choose precisely the one word that would convey the whole scene. This, he said, created an “organic rhythm,” and captured the inner conditions of the character. It was, in short, true to life as it was lived."