XXX
It was cold on the banks of the Enisei
River. The river stood just south of the
Arctic Circle, not that that did any good.
It was Siberia, so the few rays of sunshine that managed to crack the
frozen landscape only stayed for a couple of months of the year. This was political exile at its finest. Only the most hated were sent to little Kureika,
that tiny hamlet village on the edge of the frozen river, and Soso knew it.
Gone were the days of the mercy of his
youth. He remembered back to when he
would wonder how his father could have become so hardened to society. But he wondered no more, his heart had become
like a steel-encased drum. It no longer
felt, it had frozen under the tundra where he had spent the last three years in
exile.
Sometimes he wondered what life would
have been like without his mother.
Perhaps he would have grown up to be a normal Georgian cobbler. He would have never learned Russian, never
had anyone poke fun at his accent. He
would have avoided prison and exile, and he wouldn’t be having to scavenge the
land as a hunter and fisher, reduced to the most basic of human instincts-that
of a killer.
Sometimes, when he returned to his small
wooden hut, he would look in his old briefcase, which now held only one item,
that of the suit he had worn when he had been sent into exile in 1913, and the
waves of memory would crash over him, overwhelming him with what might have
been. He wished he could go back, to
become that innocent cobbler. A man that
turned to drinking to get away from the pain of life as his own life fuse
slowly fizzled out. Yes, that was the
life he wanted. And in the bitter cold
winter nights, as he huddled near his small fireplace in his little hut, that
nightmare haunted him. He saw his mother
telling him to go to Seminary and become a priest. And now he realized what a dream that would
have been, such a good life, a life stolen from him by the Tsarist government.
And then he remembered why he had chosen
his path. He saw his father being
whipped for offending a Russian. He saw
his mother’s poverty and how she abased herself in front of the teachers of the
Seminary. He saw his teachers mocking
him in his Georgian accent. He saw the
rampant poverty in the streets, and the way the native Georgians were
mistreated. No, he could not go
back. He could not change how he
felt. He would not go back. He could not live in ignorance as a cobbler. He couldn’t shut his eye to the workings of
the world, to the fact that he was less than those in his country. He could not become a priest and sordidly
take orders from a church that served the Tsar.
No, indeed, it was the Russians fault for not killing him when they had
the chance.
But he was not all alone in this frozen
prison. He had learned to hunt and fish
from some of the local Siberian tribesmen that frequented the area. He had also come into contact with a young
girl named Lidia with whom he had already fathered one child, but he had died
in childbirth. The Tsar had taken
everything from Soso, everything but his steel heart.
But Soso held on. He heard rumors. Rumors that the war was going badly for Russia. Rumors that the countryside was in
uproar. That in an attempt to conscript most
of Central Asia, much of Russia had revolted.
He knew his time was coming, and this time he wouldn’t miss his
opportunity.
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