Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Archil Sulakauri
From The Doves (1960)
Translated by I. Petrova and Ts. Topuridze
The raindrops rapped on the bottom of the pail.
For a while they were silent. His hands in his pockets, Levan paced quietly around. Occasionally he stopped near the dovecot to look at the doves: heads stuck out of their nests, they cooed softly.
Nana turned toward the dovecot and listened to their cooing too. After a while, she said: “I can’t believe there’s a war on…”
“And towns are being destroyed, and people are dying…”
“I wonder when the war will end?”
“How do you mean?”
“There’s no war for my brother…There’s nothing for him. My mother cries all the time.”
“Do people really die just like that, so simply?”
“How do you know whether they die simply, of whether it’s hard?”
“I don’t know, how could I? But I just can’t believe that people die so simply. Yesterday at the algebra lesson I thought so much about it that I saw us quite clearly sitting together on the roof, just as we were last Sunday. You wanted to talk with the wounded soldiers. You stood up and began to talk to them by signs. Just then a third man came up to the window. You looked at him for a long time, then you suddenly went white. You said to me in a trembling voice, ‘Nana, come here!’ I came up. ‘Look at that man with the bandage over his eyes. Look at him!’ I looked at him, and I shook all over. You asked, ‘Why are you shaking, Nana, what’s the matter with you?’ And I yelled at the top of my voice, ‘Levan, it’s him, it’s really him! He can’t see anything, he’s got that bandage over his eyes. He doesn’t know what street he’s in, or what building! Levan, that’s your brother, really it is!…Let’s go to him, quickly.’”
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