Ossetia Safari V

We only drive back for a hundred meters. Seeing a lit window at one of the nearby houses, we stop to talk to the locals. A woman comes out, puzzled by the camera but nevertheless willing to give us her story. She is Ossetian, her husband died and she now lives alone in this house in no man’s land. Her son lives in Tskhinvali now, but she doesn’t want to abandon the house. She shows us the bullet holes that pierced the metal front door and hit her husband. He eventually recovered from the wound, but his lower limbs stayed inert until he died.

The woman takes us to the house next door. We make our way through pitch darkness helped by cell phones improvised as flash lights. In the next house we see a man, probably in his 60s, with sharp blue eyes and a prominent nose. We ask him a few question about the conflict, what they think about this and that politician, but the old man really wants to tell us his story. Which is similar to many of the story we’ve heard on either side today. Filled with frustration, sadness, desperation and fear. Unaware that I don’t speak Russian, the man addresses me in long sentences, and his eyes start filling with tears.

This is a sad ending to a long and exhausting day. I thought this would be an adventure, and indeed the experience of seeing the actual front lines of a frozen conflict is unique. Yet the sheer impact of reality doesn’t hit you when seeing the tanks, or the soldiers. It is the local people – their sadness, desperation, hopelessness and anger – that really drives home the unique relevance of this conflict for the ones most affected by it.

The old Ossetian man wipes his tears, invites us inside the house and, helped by the women, produces a two liter Pepsi bottle filled with homemade wine, as well as cheese, tomatoes and bread. We toast to everything, but especially to piece, friendship, families (living or gone). The Ossetian (and Georgian) ritual requires one to drink the entire glass of wine once the toast is finished. As we get to the fourth glass, I realize the absurdity of the situation: I am having an improvised supra (banquet) offered by Ossetians, according to Georgian rituals, in a strip of no man’s land that is disputed between a recently recovered failed state and a non-state backed up by a super-state. If it sounds complicated, well, that’s because it is.

Once the wine is finished and the good-byes are said, we get back into the old Niva. To my surprise, the Soviet SUV makes it successfully up the hill through the non-existent road. We reach the Georgian troops to find out that everybody is on high alert looking for us. They seem relieved to see us and inform us that all soldiers are aware of our presence and that the road is clear. We make our way into the gravel road, onto the potholed road, back into Georgia and finally to the highway going to Tbilisi.