Read Georgian Writer Guram Rcheulishvili’s Heartbreaking Short Story, 'Kitesa'

Kitesa lay dying. His grandson was playing at the end of the couch.
He dragged the three-legged stool back and forth up to the wall then
stood on it and pulled grapes off the end of a vine. Kitesa saw very well
what he was doing but he had not the strength to tell him off. “Where
the bloody hell is that kid’s father?” he moaned to himself. “The old
cow had to go and die now, didn’t she?” he said, remembering his
daughter-in-law. “If he reaches it, he’ll pull the whole vine down.” He
grew weaker, and he closed his eyes slowly. Then all of a sudden, he
heard his grandson fall down on the floor with a thud, and with it, the
sound of him crying.
Kitesa lay dying.
He had become an old man.
The villagers measured the years by him.
“He’s all a bit washed up now, is old Kitesa,” they said.
He was over a hundred years old.
Once he had been a young man.
He tried to remember this time before he died. He had wanted to
feel sorrier for himself. He dug around in his memory, he tried with all
his might, but he only saw a spade before him.
A spade and black soil, or a clay pit.
He could just about make out his wife, but she was covered by the
spade.
A spade and black earth.
He lost all strength. He could no longer worry about his grandson,
and his wife’s face was completely obscured so that there was no
longer anything hidden behind the spade.
He lay dying.
Kitesa was born during the reign of the third from last king. He grew
up without any clothes on his back. When he reached the age of seven,
they clothed him in rags. The soles of his feet were tough. His father
gave him a spade with a broken handle and set him to work digging
furrows. He would cut his callused feet on the head of the spade, then
they would heal and harden.
Time passed in a flash.
He dug relentlessly.
When he had finished, he was sent on to somebody else.
Whereas their soil was too clayey for vines to flourish, at the new
place the soil was black and it was easier to dig.
It was stony in places and the blade of Kitesa’s spade would often
break. He would go and buy a new one himself.
He could not remember where the time had gone.
Then he got married.
Then his wife died.
Then he married again.
He had four children with this wife. Two died and two lived.
Then this wife died too.
Then he married his neighbour’s widow. He had four children with
her.
Then he went far away to work on the land.
When he was working on building the road to Svaneti, his first-born
died, and the second-born drowned in the river. Despite this he worked
through the spring. Both babies were buried by the roadside. On their
graves he put up two pinewood crosses that he had carved with his
own hands.
One of the other workers brought him the news of his wife’s death.
He took the pittance he had earned back to the village; it all went on
having a prayer said for his wife and children that had all died that
same year.
Then he worked on the roads for a year.
In Qaraiazi the soil was black, and it was easy to dig.
Three years later he was in Racha. The ground there was stony, and
he would often break the head of his spade.
His children died off one by one. Only one of them, a son, survived;
he grew old without having married, then at the age of eighty
he took a wife. They say that he had taken an oath. Most people
thought there was something wrong with him. The village kids
used to follow him wherever he went and throw stones at him.
At the age of eighty-four, four years after he had got married, Kitesa’s
son had a child.
Then Kitesa’s daughter-in-law passed away.
Now the family consisted of a grandfather, a ninety-year-old son,
and a six-year-old grandson.
The son was digging in the vineyard.
Kitesa lay dying.
The grandson had been weeping and was drying his eyes.
Again, Kitesa saw his spade before him. It seemed to him that the
blade was blunt and the shaft was broken. He made to sit up so he
could shout at the boy, but as he looked round he could not make sense
of anything, and he lay down again.
And so the little one carried on playing.
Kitesa lay dying.
And then he died.
It was a summer.
On the third day they used flat-bladed spades to dig him a grave
in the vineyard. Vines could barely grow there in the clayey soil. They
lowered him into his resting place, and scattered some clay on top. His
body took up quite a bit of space, and there was some earth left over
that they left on the grave, before tidying it up a little, and that was
that.
Then somewhere Kitesa’s son rummaged and found a spade shaft,
broken in two; he nailed it together to make a cross, and he stuck it at
the head of the grave.

Kitesa and more works by Guram Rcheulishvili can be read in Unlocking The Door, a collection of stories and plays translated into English by students at Oxford University, supervised and edited by Lia Chokoshvili. It will be published by Cezanne in January 2018.